Over the recent past, Slavoj Zizek has attracted a kind of cult followership. Some devotees attend to each of his public appearances, consult all his interventions on the internet, and voraciously read each and every volume that he publishes at an amazing pace. For others, he is a proto-terrorist on the loose, and his brand mix of Freudism and Marxism sets back the intellectual clock to the worst hours of leftist dogmatism. For my part, although I am far from sharing Zizek's political orientation, I find reading the Slovenian social scientist a useful distraction from more conventional readings, as well as a useful mind-stretching exercise. Like many other readers, I read Zizek for fun.
But reading In Defense of Lost Causes made me think again about why I took to reading his works with a kind of compulsive frenzy. I can think of several reasons. First, there is the shock of provocation, the "can he really mean that?" feeling when you stumble across sentences like "We need to reinvent revolutionary terror", "Today the enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It is called Democracy" or "The problem with Hitler is that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not 'essential' enough", or again chapters titled "How Stalin Saved the Humanity of Man" or "Give the Dictatorship of the Proletariat a Chance!"
So my first impulse was to check out his politics, so as to determine whether he really meant what he wrote. In fact, it took me a while to see clearly through his political agenda, as the first work I read (The Parallax View) was not very explicit in that respect. But In Defense of Lost Causes presents a clear overview on where Zizek stands with respect to issues of democracy, revolutionary terror, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the New Left agenda, or the antiglobalization movement. And there is only one conclusion I could draw: when he writes something, he means it.
The second element that makes reading Zizek an addictive pastime is the broad array of his references, spanning from pop culture to classical philosophers like Kant, Hegel and Heidegger, or modern critical theorists like Badiou, Laclau, Negri, Mouffe or Deleuze. Readers who praise Zizek's references to pop culture, his ability to mix high-brow references to continental philosophers with astute commentaries of Hollywood productions, might be frustrated with this volume. Zizek has only one single chapter on popular movies and novels. But his analysis of the commonalities in Michael Crichton's novels (fear of women) or in Steven Spielberg dramas (the rebuilding of a family), or his disclosure of the subversive element in Zack Snider's 300 (the film can be viewed as an apology of resistance to US imperialism) are pure Zizek vintage.
Zizek also reveals himself as a classical music lover, revisiting the debate on whether Dmitri Shostakovitch was a faithful Soviet composer or a closet dissident, or comparing him to the fate of Sergei Prokofiev, the other great name of Soviet music, who had a more tormented relationship to the regime. Other passages include an in-depth analysis of Robert Schumann's Humoresque, a piano piece with the vocal line reduced to silence, or the hint that Beethoven implanted a subversive irony toward the ideal of universal brotherhood in his Ninth Symphony's Ode to Joy.
The third reason that makes me relish Zizek is because I share with him a cultural horizon that tends to get lost in the current intellectual debate. Zizek bears testimony to a time when conservative intellectuals could engage their radical brethren on a discussion about dialectic materialism or the subversive element in Freud's writings. Zizek refers to marxism and psychoanalysis because they are "not only theories about struggle, but theories which are themselves engaged in a struggle". Here struggle should not be understood solely in terms of politics and ideology, but as a struggle within the self, an inner strive that leads to a higher form of self-consciousness. This is why many among the best conservative intellectuals, and this also includes the neo-cons, were former marxists, or at least defined their thought in relation to marxism.
According to Zizek, we now live in a post-ideological world, not in the conventional sense that we are at least liberated from the burden of great ideological narratives, but in the more cynical sense that power no longer needs to legitimize its rule and now exposes itself naked. The search for profit, the debasement of any intellectual pursuit, the acknowledgement of the use of torture are now part of our political horizon. This situation satisfies him: what Zizek hates the most is the recuperation of subversive discourses by the powers that be, who treat radical theorists as "harmless gadflies who sting us and thus awaken us to the inconsistencies and imperfection of our democratic enterprise."
Zizek wants no part in this legitimation business. Neither harmless gadfly nor amusing pet, he would like to rekindle the flame of radicalism that burned out after the seventies. But as we know, history only repeats itself as farce.
