First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

by Slavoj Žižek

Genres: Nonfiction

164 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 5, 2009

About the author

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovene sociologist, philosopher, and cultural critic.

He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of SFR Yugoslavia). He received a Doctor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of Ljubljana and studied psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII with Jacques-Alain Miller and François Regnault. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party Liberal Democracy of Slovenia for Presidency of the Republic of Slovenia (an auxiliary institution, abolished in 1992).

Since 2005, Žižek has been a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Žižek is well known for his use of the works of 20th century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. He writes on many topics including the Iraq War, fundamentalism, capitalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, post-marxism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País he jokingly described himself as an "orthodox Lacanian Stalinist". In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! he described himself as a "Marxist" and a "Communist."

Reviews

[Andrioux · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was my introduction to Zizek. I am not from his social class, and I am very far off from being an academic - so the writing, with all the name dropping and specialized language - put me off a bit.

If his goal is to galvanize the general population, and working classes in particular - he is not doing a very good job about it.

He goes on to explore many of the problems that have resulted from our current neoliberal system, such as tax-payer subsidized bailouts for white collar criminals, imminent climate collapse, social alienation, market monopolies, the rise of the super-rich elite, religious fundamentalism, anti-semitism, forms of modern imperialism... - I mean, the topics really are exhaustive. After listing all of these problems, he then reveals his answer: revolution, in the form of communism.

Reading this book did help give me a concise, if incomplete, view of the state of the world through Zizek's eyes. He references a lot of historical people and events that I noted down for future research.

This book gave me a lot of food for thought, and I enjoyed the questions he posed throughout. Here is a quote that I thought was particularly trenchant, "The best indicator of the Left's lack of trust in itself is its fear of crisis; such a Left fears for its own comfortable position as a critical voice fully integrated into The System, ready to risk nothing." (Pg. 75)

Would I read him again? Eh.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The danger is thus that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one which, instead of awakening us from a dream, will enable us to *continue dreaming*" (20).

"The contemporary era constantly proclaims itself as post-ideological, but this denial of ideology only provides the ultimate proof that we are more than ever embedded in ideology. Ideology is always a field of struggle--among other things, the struggle for appropriating past traditions. One of the clearest indications of our predicament is the liberal appropriation of Martin Luther King, in itself an exemplary ideological operation. Henry Louis Taylor recently remarked: 'Everyoneknows, even the smallest kid knows about Martin Luther King, can say his most famous moment was that 'I have a dream' speech. No one can go further than that one sentence. ll we know is this guy had a dream. We don't know what that dream was' [...] TO put it in Badiou's terms, King followed the 'axiom of equality' well beyond the single topic of racial segregation: he was campaigning on anti-poverty and anti-war issues at the time of his death" (37-38).

"The first lesson of psychoanalysis here is that this 'richness of inner life' is fundamentally fake: it is a screen, a false distance, whose function is, as it were, to save my appearance, to render palpable (accessible to my imaginary narcissism) my true social-symbolic identity. One of the ways to practise the critique of ideology is therefore to invent strategies for unmasking the hypocrisy of 'inner life' and its 'sincere' emotions. The experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing is thus a lie--the truth lies rather outside, in what we do" (40).

"...this is why Elfriede Jelinke's advice to theater writers is not only aesthetically correct, but has deep ethical justification:

Characters on stage should be flat, like clothes in a fashion show; what you get should be no more than what you see. Psychological realism os repulsive, because it allows us to escape unpalatable reality by taking shelter in the 'luxuriousness' of personality, losing ourselves in the depth of individual character. The writer's task is to block this maneuver, to chase us off to a point from which we can view the horror with a dispassionate eye" (40).

"We should fearlessly extend this insight into the problematic of false 'humanization,' to the very basic collective form of 'telling stories about ourselves,' to the symbolic texture which provides the foundation of a community (ethnic, lifestyle, sexual, religious...) Kant's distinction between public and private uses of reason can be of great help here; the key problem with forms of so-called 'identity politics' is that they focus on 'private' identities--the ultimate horizon is that of the tolerance and intermingling of such identities, and every universality, every feature that cuts across the entire field is rejected as oppressive. Paulinian universality, in contrast, is a struggling form. When Paul says 'There are no Greeks or Jews, no men or women...' this does not mean that we are all one happy human family, but rather that there is one big divide which cuts across all these particular identities, rendering them ultimately irrelevant: 'There are no greeks or Jews, no men or women...*there are only Christians and enemies of Christianity!* Or, as we would have to put it today: there are only those who fight for emancipation and their reactionary opponents; the people and the enemies of the people"" (44-45).

"One of my favorite anecdotes regarding Niels Bohr: surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr's country house, the fellow scientist visiting him exclaimed that he did not share the superstitious belief regarding horseshoes keeping evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr snapped back: 'I don't believe in it either. I have it there because I was told that it works even when one doesn't believe in it.' This is indeed how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in them, because we assume that they work even if we do not believe in them" (51).

"This is how it goes with the right to divorce, abortion, gay marriage, and so on and so forth--these are all permissions masked as rights; they do not change in any way the distribution of powers. Such was the effect of 'the spirit of 68': it 'effectively contributed to making life easier. This is a lot, but it is not everything. Because it didn't encroach upon powers.' Therein resides 'the secret of the tranquility which has ruled in France over the last forty years'" (59-60).

"Populism is ultimately always sustained by the frustrated exasperation of ordinary people, by the cry “I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ve just had enough of it! It cannot go on! It must stop!“ Such impatient outbursts betray a refusal to understand or engage with the complexity of the situation, and give rise to the conviction that there must be somebody responsible for the mess— which is why some agent lurking behind the scenes is invariably required. Therein, in this refusal-to-know, resides the properly fetishistic dimension of populism. […] This is why, to put it in Nietzschean terms, which are here highly appropriate, the ultimate difference between a truly radical emancipatory politics and a populist politics is that the former is active, it imposes and enforces its vision, while populism is fundamentally re-active, the result of a reaction to a disturbing intruder. In other words, populism remains a version of the politics of fear: it mobilizes the crowd by stoking up fear of the corrupt external agent”" (61).

"Do we need further proof that Capital is the Real of our lives, a Real whose imperatives are much more absolute than even the most pressing demands of our social and natural reality? It was Joseph Brodsky who provided an appropriate solution to the search for the mysterious 'fifth element,' the quintessential ingredient of our reality: 'Along with air, earth, water, and fire, money is the fifth natural force a human being has to reckon with most often'" (80). [From LESS THAN ONE: SELECTED ESSAYS, 1986]

"The only *true* question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today's global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are four such antagonisms:

--the looming threat of an *ecological* catastrophe;

--the inappropriateness of the notion of *private property* in relation to so-called 'intellectual property';

--the socio-ethical implications of *new techno-scientific developments* (especially in biogenetics);

--and, last but not least, the creation of *new forms of apartheid*, new Walls and slums.

There is a qualitative difference between this last feature--the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included--and the other three, which designate different aspects of what Hardt and Negri call 'the commons,' the shared substance of our social being, the privatization of which involves violent acts which should, where necessary, be resisted with violent means:

--the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of 'cognitive' capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, the political system, and so on;

--the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to rain forests and the natural habitat itself)

--the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity); with new biogenetic technology, the creation of a New Man in the literal sense of changing human nature becomes a realistic prospect.

What the struggles in all these domains share is an awareness of the potential for destruction, up to and including the self-annihilation of humanity itself, should the capitalist logic of enclosing the commons be allowed a free run" (90-91)

"If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times. It is easy to see how each of the three processes of proletariatanization refer to an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives...At all these levels, things are approaching a zero-point; 'the end of times is near.' Here is Ed Ayres description:

We are being confronted by something so completely outside our collective experience that we don't really see it, even when the evidence is overwhelming. For us, that 'something' is a blitz of enormous biological and physical alterations in the world that has been sustaining us.'" (93).
[From "Why are we not astonished?, World Watch, vol 12, May 1999]

"Communism is to be opposed to socialism, which, in place of the egalitarian collective, offers an organic community (nazism was national socialism, not national communism). In other words, while there may be a socialist antisemitism, there cannot be a communist form. […] Eric Hobsbawm recently published a column with the title ‘Socialism Failed, What Comes Next?’ The answer is: communism. Socialism wants to solve the first three antagonisms without addressing the fourth— without the singular universality of the proletariat. The only way for the global capitalist system to survive. It’s a long-term antagonism and simultaneously avoid the communist solution, will be forwarded to reinvent some kind of socialism— in the guise of communitarianism, or populism, or capitalism with Asian values, or some other configuration. The future will thus be communist… Or socialist”" (95).

"As Michael Hardt has put it, if capitalism stands for private property and socialism for state property, communism stands for the overcoming of property as such in the commons. Socialism is what Mark’s called ‘ vulgar communism,’ in which we get only what Hegel would’ve called the abstract negation of property, that is, the negation of property within the field of property— it is ‘universalized private property’" (95).

"Badiou's 'subtraction,' like Hegel's Aufheblung, contains three different layers of meaning: 1) to withdraw, disconnect; 2) to reduce the complexity of a situation to its minimal difference; 3) to destroy the existing order. As in Hegel, the solution is not to differentiate the three meanings (eventually proposing a specific term for each of them), but to grasp subtraction as the unity of its three dimensions: one should withdraw from being immersed in a situation in such a way that the withdrawal renders visible the 'minimal difference' sustaining the situation's multiplicity, and thereby causes its disintegration, just as the withdrawal of a single card from a house of cards causes the collapse of the entire edifice" (129).

"Here, one should shamelessly repeat the lesson of Lenin's *State and Revolution*: the goal of revolutionary violence is not to take over state power, but to transform it, radically changing its functioning, its relationship to its base, and so on. Therein resides the key component of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'" (130).

"What this means, of course, is not that we should renounce democracy on behalf of capitalist progress, but that we should confront the limitations of parliamentary democracy, nicely formulated by Noam Chomsky when he noted that 'it is only when the threat of popular participation is overcome that democratic forms can be safely contemplated. He thereby identified the 'passivizing' core of parliamentary democracy which makes it incompatible with the direct political self-organization of the people" (133-34).

"In the same way that (market) freedom is unfreedom for those who sell their labor-power, in the same way that the family is undermined by the bourgeois family as legalized prostitution, democracy is undermined by the parliamentary form with its concomitant passivization of the large majority, as well as by the growing executive power implied by the increasingly influential logic of the emergency state" (135).

"It is this, the authentic potential of democracy, which is now losing ground to the rise of authoritarian capitalism, whose tentacles are inching closer and closer to the West. In each country, of course, in accordance with its own 'values': PUtin's capitalism with 'Russian values' (the brutal display of power), Berlusconi's capitalism with 'Italian values' (comical posturing). Both Putin and Berlusconi rule in democracies which are increasingly reduced to empty ritualized shells, and in spite of the rapidly worsening economic situation, they both enjoy a high level of popular support (over 60 percent in the polls). No wonder they are personal friends..." (138).

"The working class is thus split into three, each fraction with its own 'way of life' and ideology: the enlightened hedonism and liberal multiculturalism of the intellectual class; the populist fundamentalism of the working class; more extreme and singular forms of the outcast fraction. In Hegelese, this triad is clearly the triad of the universal (intellectual workers), the particular (manual workers), and the singular (outcasts). The outcome of this process is the gradual disintegration of social life proper, of a public space in which all three fractions could meet, and 'identity' politics in all its forms is a supplement for this loss. Identity politics acquire a specific form within each fraction: multicultural identity, politics among the intellectual class; regressive, populist, fundamentalism among the working class; semi-illegal groupings (criminal gangs, religious sex, etc). among the outcast. What they all share is recourse to a particular identity as a substitute for the missing universal public space" (147)

"Even the liberal notion of electing the people most 'qualified' to lead is not sufficient here. One should pursue this to the end and endorse the basic insight of ancient democracy: that choice by a lot is the only true democratic choice. This is why Kojin Karatani’s proposal of combining elections with lotteries in determining who will rule is more traditional than it may at first appear (he himself mentions Ancient Greece)—paradoxically, it fulfills the same function as Hegel‘s theory of monarchy. Karatani here takes a heroic risk and proposing a crazy-sounding definition of the difference between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship of the proletariat: ‘If universal suffrage by secret ballot, namely, parliamentary, democracy, is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the introduction of lottery should be deemed to the dictatorship of the proletariat’" (152-53).

[Yumarie Esma · Rating 3 out of 5]

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce explains how real societal collapse is first seen as a serious disaster only to later be turned into a shallow joke of progress. Žižek argues that we’ve taken major crises like economic crashes, political failures, and social breakdowns and turned them into marketing tools. For instance, companies pollute the planet, then slap a green label on their products and call it change. Society sells overpriced lattes and self-care mantras while everything quietly burns in the background. Žižek cuts through the fluff and delivers a brutal critique of capitalism, liberal democracy, and the hollow promises of “changing the world.” It’s not a light, cozy read, but if you’re already spiraling, Žižek will be right there saying, “See? That’s ideology.”