Guardian article on Zizek

In case anyone missed it:  Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | Saturday interview: Slavoj Zizek.  Also linked to and commented on at Charlotte Street and Infinite Thought.

While he is not a believer himself, he sees it as his mission to rage against the demise of our Judaeo-Christian heritage and its replacement by a burgeoning palette of destructive, new-age attempts at spirituality. Typically, his soft spot for both Leninism and Christianity is a deliberate kick against the tide of the times.

Whereas it is now de rigueur for intellectuals to profess a certain grudging respect for Marx and his analysis, Lenin's reputation - even among leftists - remains that of a brutal authoritarian pragmatist. Zizek begs to differ. For him, Lenin was the St Paul of communism, the organisational genius who, just as St Paul invented the Christian church, turned communism from an idea into a global movement. We should miss both Lenin and St Paul, he argues, because these days we are retreating into a new-age spirituality that turns up its nose at any engagements in the real world.

I don't put much stock in interviews or journalistic summaries. It's too easy for interviewer and interviewee to yield to the temptation to provide a soundbite or say something outrageous. It's also easy to get misquoted. Journalists may well screw up various contexts. For example, James Harkin, the author of this little piece, opposes the idea that Lenin was a brutual authoritarian pragmatist with the suggestion that leftists don't respect Lenin, on the one hand, and that Zizek thinks of Lenin as an organizational genius, on the other. These suggestions are misleading.

Back in the 80s, when I studied the Soviet Union, my professor, Stephen F. Cohen, both admired Lenin and acknowledged his pragmatism. There was a strong trend at the time to uncouple Lenin and Stalin, particularly in light of the New Economic Policy of the twenties. In my view, simply to dismiss Lenin as brutal and authoritarian relies on a set of Cold War assumptions. Additionally, if Zizek's writings in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? are any indication, his admiration for Lenin is not a matter of Lenin as an organizer, but of Lenin as someone who was willing to act, who was willing to seize an opportunity, who recognized that history is not determined by causal laws but that the very unfolding of history is the result of contingent acts and interventions.

The analogy between Lenin and St. Paul is also not one that should be reduced to organizational skills. The Pauline theology Zizek admires is one that recognizes the miracle of Grace, the intervention in history that changes eternity. In each case, Lenin and Paul, what we have is an example of the Act, an intervention that changes not only the situation into which it intervenes, but time itself. The very meaning of existence, of the world, of history, is not the same following the intervention. In fact, both Lenin's intervention and St. Paul's theology exemplify Acts that produce new norms, that produce the new standards by which they will be judged. This, by the way, is what Stalin could never forget: he would be forever judged by the new norms introduced by Lenin.

What I like about the interview, however, is the way that it points to Zizek's efforts to keep a space for past hopes. By reinvigorating the legacy of Lenin, Zizek tries to open up a space closed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, by invoking Christianity, he creates a space in philosophical circles characterized by a Derridean/Levinasian ethics of absolute responsiveness, on the one hand, and a generalized agonistism, on the other. I think it also reminds Anglo-American academics that conservative Christian fundamentalism is not the only way to read Christianity.

Comments

[Amish Lovelock]

Looks like the new book, "The Parallax View" is scheduled for April next year:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10762

[Tom]

A new book? "The Parallax View"? I'm still waiting on "The Universal Exception" and "The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology". Alas, I have little to add to your post, of which I find myself in agreement. Tom