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26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Read It As Polemic, October 12, 2009
If for nothing else, you should buy this book because it engages, in a direct and rigorous fashion, with the thought of various luminaries of the Left. While Zizek's discussions of Mao, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Robespierre are stirring in their own right, his assessments of Antonio Negri, Ernesto Laclau, Simon Critchley and fellow-traveler Alain Badiou are acute and incisive. Of especial interest is his careful evaluation of the latent ambiguities in Badiou's political thought, probing its interstices and interrogating its silences. Also crucial is Zizek's neo-Deleuzian injunction to `repeat' Lenin, to actualize the multiple virtualities that Lenin missed. The importance of Zizek for our time lies in his continued exhortation to look beneath the post-structuralist affirmations of endless differentiation, creativity and diversification- tropes that are in no way inimical to the `permanent revolution' of global capitalism- and discern the underlying sameness beneath the protean flux. For instance, what is repressed/disavowed in the First World's triumphalist discourses on limitless mobility and decentralized organization, what is its hidden subtext? As Boltanski and Chiapello have told us in The New Spirit Of Capitalism, the movement of some requires the inertia of others- the nomadic flight of today's jet-setting executive is made possible by the sweatshop worker, the office janitor, outsourced labor. As such, the properly `transcritical' attitude (Kojin Karatani) is to refrain from treating `globalization' as a revolutionary break, a `cut' in history- we must identify the residual sediments of the past that persist in our purportedly `postmodern' age (traces of premodern feudalism in Japan, the predominance of noncapitalist forms of production in South America). This theory of `uneven development' means that we should regard all celebratory affirmations of globalization with extreme suspicion.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF, April 19, 2010
The Capacity to Govern: A Report to the Club of Rome; Crazy States: A Counterconventional Strategic Problem
This book is divided against itself: parts of it are outstanding while other parts are esoteric and non-sense other than for members of a strange sect of what I call novo-Marxists.
Its basic theses that failures of the actual praxis of revolutions do not negate some of their values and that global capitalism should not be accepted as irreplaceable by better alternatives are well taken. The discussions of coping with biogenetics are fascinating. And many other insights make the book as a whole worth reading.
However, instead of focusing on main theses and working out coherent alternatives to global capitalism, or at least indicating ways to inventing such alternatives, the book gets lost in at least four labyrinths: (1) It devotes a lot of space to debates with other "sect members" on esoteric issues and responses to their criticism of the author's writings; (2) the book is one-dimensional in its assumptions on human psychology, relying i on some versions of Lacan and Lacanian reinterpretations of Freud, completely ignoring alternative and not less "scientific" schools of psychology; (3) it is captive to Marxian paradigms, making artificial efforts to fit important ideas into outdated language games, instead of bravely developing new paradigms; and (4) the authors pins his hopes on "trust in the people" without any non-anecdotal justification either in history or social sciences.
The fourth error is the most serious of all, undermining the main thrust of the book. The author relies on the new global excluded population of slum-dwellers as the new "good old Marxist...proletarian revolutionary subject " (page 425), where one should look for "signs of the new forms of social awareness that will emerge from the slum collectives: they will be the germs of the future." (page 426). This ignores the realities of slum populations as revealed in empirical studies, ignores radical differences between various groups of slum populations, and leaves out of account the near-certainty that if they should endanger a state or the global order, they will be easily and effectively "repressed" in one way or another.
The author demonstrates in this book ability to contribute to an urgently needed paradigmatic global revolution, but not as long as he is captive to phantasm. What is really needed is some kind of a "Global Leviathan" containing the danger of "the acts of a single socio-political agent [who] can really alter and even interrupt the global historical process [for the worse, up to global calamity] (page 421, my additions in brackets) and to take care of new forms of the "common" as rightly discussed by the author. But such a Global Leviathan can probably only take the form of an authoritative oligarchy of main powers, contrary to from the dreams of the authors.
To make a real contribution of at least some historic significance, the author needs a good dose of "subtraction" (to use a favorite term of the book) from the ideological traps in which this book is caught.
Professor Yehezkel Dror
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
msdror@mscc.huji.ac.il
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33 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
No one said it would be easy, June 25, 2008
This review is from: In Defense of Lost Causes (Hardcover)
Mao said, the revolution is not a dinner party, and along the way horrible things may happen, Zizek here reclaims, or claims again(resurgence) the demise of thinking through the paradigm of change, it is not so much a matter of what has gone wrong but seeing one's mistakes, failing and going on- at it again, he likes Beckett's apt phrase, of Fail and fail again,we are human failure is part of what we do, nature somehow missed this, for now we may create ourselves out of existence with control over bio-political horizons, cloning,DNA research;software robotics;there is a chapter on this;UNBEHAGEN IN DER NATUR; but Zizek is getting good at writing, yes the entertainment factor is contained, he relies on sober analysis of the state of democracy and culture, exploitation,religion,hot spots the Right and the Left, the points of representation as the favelas, or the Zapatistas, Lulu in Brazil, the Left in Europe,Negri, Mao, Lenin, Critchley and Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, all become objects for contemplation on the objects of the state and transformations or lack thereof, the Cultural Revolution,(can collectives run the state?) all through the Lens of Lacan at times, or Hegel,certainly Marx; all well thought through; You come away with a real sense of knowing where things are within the globe, where greed resides,false hopes; "what should be done", and not done, the spectre of Walter Benjamin hovers here with the strain of Messianism, reclaiming the path to enlightenment and simple understanding, why revolutions failed is not so much the aim here as how to pick up the pieces once the Winter Palace was seized; perhaps Lenin believed in revolution but also that nothing happened in Soviet Russia; dual powere as well is great objects for discussion, as we find today, Zizek opts for a kind of nomadic resistence, create your own alternate spaces within capitalism, it is not going away, work within it, give concerts of political music in your friend's loft(don't publicize it) and invite your marxist friends(Freundshaft) with your stock broker friends as well;Deleuze as well makes an appearence herein, the "objects without a body",(OwaB)and(BwaO)sort of a Webern-ian mirror reversal on virtuality, the the spaces we like to inhabit, our comfort zones of contemplation and cognition;Zizek also follows quite well serious music, with a fascinating discussion on the "smoking gun" of Shostakovich, was he a committed socialist or not,with hundreds of thousands of dollars in production of the performances of his symphonies, I'd think the fundraising boards at USA orchestras should know. . . he is compared to Prokofiev,who was above all this dirty poltical stuff. . . great read . . .
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