Surviving Ideology

A cursory critique of the more public Slavoj Zizek

Marc Chagall

"The unexamined life is not worth living." -- Socrates via Plato (or Plato via Socrates) (or both)

In February, Slavoj Zizek wrote an article loosely attached to the unified protests in Bosnia-Herzogovina. Zizek paints a portrait in which "we see the demonstrators waving three flags side by side: Bosnian, Serb, Croat, expressing the will to ignore ethnic differences. ... What the Bosnian outburst confirms is that one cannot genuinely overcome ethnic passions by imposing a liberal agenda: what brought the protesters together is a radical demand for justice."

Zizek expresses the similarity of this moment with "the enemy soldiers fraternising across the trenches in the first world war", an "authentic emancipatory event".

Unfortunately, the auspices of this event are those of oppression. The "radical demand for justice" is very basic, very fundamental. These ethnic groups together sought "jobs, a decent life, an end to corruption", objects so universally valued that there are few upon the earth who would deny their significance. While such an event is certainly inspiring and reaffirmative of these essential desires of the human heart that bind us all together, regardless of our differences, it is yet not such a landmark as it may seem. 

Indeed, "the people of Bosnia have finally understood who their true enemy is: not other ethnic groups, but their own leaders who pretend to protect them from others", but it is only when their most inalienable rights are threatened that such unity is apparently possible. As above, they face a common enemy to life and livelihood itself.

Zizek sees this as a beautiful alternative to the rise of fascism brought about by the "left's failure". But the situation in Bosnia-Herzogovina is merely a regression, the return to a point at which the examined life is not possible because humanity is deprived of certain requirements for society. Immediately antecedent to this crisis, Bosnia was "a country which, in the last decades, has become synonymous with ferocious ethnic cleansing".

It is difficult to say that such a unification of these ethnic groups is a step forward towards a true democracy, but it is possible that we who sit outside the conflict may observe the role of justice and change our ways. There is a simple lesson to learn: what draws the people together is justice. 

A word too often manipulated throughout history, but which still rings of a perfection beyond human attainability. If one were to approach every matter from the perspective of the man who seeks justice -- to give every person his/her due -- he would be difficult to ignore in argument or debate. This is the hope that Zizek's portrait reveals:

• The conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict – a vicious cycle of the two poles generating and presupposing each other. What Max Horkheimer said about fascism and capitalism back in the 1930s (that those who do not want to talk critically about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism) should be applied to today's fundamentalism: those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.

Justice is the gathering point, the place in which all clamor must cease. Justice recalls our duty to examine what we hold in common, in respect of which we must pursue a social resolution that renders men live, whole, and happy. It is much easier to listen to someone who is willing to discuss all points, and, measuring all holistically, come to a conclusion that suits all because it nods in every direction without bowing in any.

But with Zizek, too, we must give what is due. We must disagree that he understands what this justice is. We must disagree that "a new Dark Age is looming, with ethnic and religious passions exploding and Enlightenment values receding. These passions were lurking in the background all the time, but what is new is the outright shamelessness of their display."

For to highlight the "shamelessness" of even Islamist reactionaries while neglecting to note the desperately extreme moral depravity of the West is to fail to recognize that the looming "Dark Age" is one instigated by Enlightenment values, and met with the disgusted and frightened herd of ludditism. 

In fact, those pillars of Western Civilization which now recede are the learned Greeks and the Christians who bore them up out of decadence, the great philosophical, theological, and literary traditions that still cling with fingers faithful to the barren earth.

"Lurking in the background" of Zizek's global imagination is that same undiscerning tolerance that left the garden untended while the golden serpent danced and writhed, that subtlest beast of all the field, and left man in the dark for saying he could know God's mind and act in his stead.

As the aforementioned "simplistic liberal universalism long ago lost its innocence", so Zizek's statement in his article of May 6 that "only a transnational entity can manage" to "teach the superpowers, old and new, some manners" proffers a worldview that will only inevitably lose its innocence, hastening a wasteland of the dispossessed and disemboweled.

If the current panoply of armed superpowers assaults human dignity by playing puppet -- in Zizek's quotation of Popper, "hypothesizing" -- with smaller national and cultural entities, then how heavily will a global power (made up of who else but a narrowing cadre of superpower regimes) crush the lighted prism of the world.