I’m about halfway through this and it’s safe to say that I won’t finish reading it. No desire. With that said, it might be of interest to you.
Organon 3
And Whatever You Do, DON’T READ LACANWhen I say “don’t read,” I don’t mean it in a fascist kind of way. I’m not suggesting these thinkers should be burned, or that they’re dangerous, or that they’re subversive. I’m just suggesting that reading them not a very good use of your time. If you want to waste your own time, be my guest. Reading Zizek’s 60 or so books is a lot like watching reality shows on Bravo - it’s pretty much all the same annoying shit with a slightly different packaging each time, and after a while you lose track of the words and all you can see is the flying spittle.
What I mean more than anything when I say “read” or “don’t read” is ignore people who tell you you should be reading these people and not these other people. Obviously, that gives you carte blanche to ignore my advice, too, but since I get pretty frequent messages asking me what and how to read in the history of philosophy, I’m putting in my two cents. Think of it this way: our ideal of the humanities is to have as many people thinking as many different things as possible, right? We want, ideally, to avoid both ideological blind spots and the kind of homogeneity that stifles innovation and creativity. Well, there’s a statistical excuse right there to read the people I’m recommending - every English major has heard of Lacan and Hegel, very few of them have heard of Epictetus. Bring something new to the table. Take a chance. This is exactly what Deleuze calls “minor philosophy.”
Obviously, this razor cuts both ways. In an imaginary future academy where, as Foucault once predicted, the 21st century has become Deleuzian, perhaps reading Hegel will be an act of subversion. Perhaps. But for now, all we have is a nihilistic obsession with the Master-Slave Dialectic and negation, while Spinoza’s pure immanence and Hume’s common sense remain largely ignored.
I have walked through the hell of phenomenology. I’ve read Ecrits, Being and Time, and The Phenomenology of the Spirit. I’ve read pretty much everything Derrida ever wrote and I’ve worked my way through all of Kant’s critiques. And I am alone escaped to tell thee: thinking doesn’t need to be so painful. Just trust me. Start reading. You have no idea how much more beautiful your intellectual labor will become when the motor of your critical thinking stops being the dialectic of anxiety and starts being the experience of joy.
I love this so much. (Bolded emphasis is mine)
What about the apparent absurdity of the ideas of dignity, freedom and reason being sustained by extreme military discipline, including the practice of discarding weak children? This apparent absurdity is just the price of freedom - “Freedom is not free,” as it is said in the film. Freedom is not something given, but rather is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. The ruthless military discipline of the Spartans is not just the opposite of Athenian “liberal democracy”; it is its inherent condition and lays the foundation for it.
True freedom is not freedom of choice made from a safe distance; it is not like choosing between a strawberry cake or a chocolate cake. True freedom overlaps with necessity - one makes a free choice when one’s choice puts at stake one’s very existence. One does it because one cannot do otherwise. When one’s country is under foreign occupation and one is called by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, it is phrased not as, “You are free to choose,” but, “Can’t you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?” No wonder all early modern egalitarian radicals, from Rousseau to the Jacobins, admired the Spartans and imagined republican France as a new Sparta. There is an emancipatory core in the Spartan spirit of military discipline that survives once you subtract all the historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule - the ruthless exploitation of slaves, and so on. No wonder Trotsky described the Soviet Union in the difficult years of “war communism” as a “proletarian Sparta”.
Soldiers are not bad per se but soldiers mobilised by nationalist poetry are. There is no ethnic cleansing without poetry. Why? Because we live in an era that perceives itself as post-ideological. Given that great public causes no longer have the force to mobilise people for mass violence, a larger sacred cause is needed, one that makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial.
Religion fits this role perfectly, and so does ethnic belonging. There are instances of pathological atheists being capable of committing mass murder just for pleasure but they are rare exceptions. The masses need to be anaesthetised against their elementary sensitivity to the suffering of others and, for this, a sacred cause is needed. Religious ideologues claim that, whether its dogmas are true or not, religion can make otherwise bad people do some good. Yet, as Steven Weinberg has argued, without religion, good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, but only religion can make good people do bad.
Plato’s reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city. It was rather sensible advice, however, at least when judged from the vantage point of the post-Yugoslav experience, in which ethnic cleansing was prepared by the dangerous dreams of poets. True, Slobodan Milosevic “manipulated” nationalist passions but it was the poets who provided him with the raw material that lent itself to manipulation. They - the sincere poets, not the corrupted politicians - were at the origin of it all when, back in the 1970s and early 1980s, they started to sow the seeds of aggressive nationalism not only in Serbia but also in other Yugoslav republics.
”This is from Slavoj Zizek’s review of Ralph Fiennes’s upcoming film adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus” for the New Statesman.
Ha ha ha.
LRB Throwback: What do Iran, Kung Fu Panda, Niels Bohr and Silvio Berlusconi have in common?
Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon hit, provides the basic co-ordinates for understanding the ideological situation I have been describing. The fat panda dreams of becoming a kung fu warrior. He is chosen by blind chance (beneath which lurks the hand of destiny, of course), to be the hero to save his city, and succeeds. But the film’s pseudo-Oriental spiritualism is constantly undermined by a cynical humour. The surprise is that this continuous making-fun-of-itself makes it no less spiritual: the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. A well-known anecdote about Niels Bohr illustrates the same idea. Surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr’s country house, a visiting scientist said he didn’t believe that horseshoes kept evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr answered: ‘Neither do I; I have it there because I was told that it works just as well if one doesn’t believe in it!’ This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware that they are corrupt, but we practise them anyway because we assume they work even if we don’t believe in them. Berlusconi is our own Kung Fu Panda. As the Marx Brothers might have put it, ‘this man may look like a corrupt idiot and act like a corrupt idiot, but don’t let that deceive you – he is a corrupt idiot.’
Berlusconi in Tehran, Slavoj Zizek. From the London Review of Books, July 2009.
Danny Leigh on conversation topics with everyone’s favorite goofball, Slavoj Žižek. [The Guardian]
It’s a fun read.
