Larval Subjects . August 19, 2007 Political Theology Posted by larvalsubjects under Politics , Religion Mark Lilla has an interesting article on the history of political theology since the 16th century in The New York Times Magazine.
The twilight of the idols has been postponed. For more than two centuries, from the American and French Revolutions to the collapse of Soviet Communism, world politics revolved around eminently political problems. War and revolution, class and social justice, race and national identity — these were the questions that divided us. Today, we have progressed to the point where our problems again resemble those of the 16th century, as we find ourselves entangled in conflicts over competing revelations, dogmatic purity and divine duty. We in the West are disturbed and confused. Though we have our own fundamentalists, we find it incomprehensible that theological ideas still stir up messianic passions, leaving societies in ruin. We had assumed this was no longer possible, that human beings had learned to separate religious questions from political ones, that fanaticism was dead. We were wrong.
Well worth the read. 12 Responses to “Political Theology”
Alex Says: August 20, 2007 at 11:16 am
Frankly, many would argue that the problem is that only when it is political (that is concerned with the public sphere and the community at large) is religion and certainly Western religion, religion at all.
I’ve only skim read the article, and I know it is a magazine piece, but I can’t help but think that any article about political theology that stops with Barth is kind of missing quite a chunk of (Christian) political theology, you know, the bit where all recent and important stuff has been said, attempting to react to the modern situation. Any article on this stuff that doesn’t mention, say, Yoder, Hauerwas and “The Desire of Nations”, seems to be incredibly lacking. To be honest, with this in mind, I don’t know if it is “well worth a read”.
Adam Says: August 22, 2007 at 10:25 pm
In fairness to the author, the article is apparently a condensation of a book-length argument.
That said, as it stands, it is unconvincing to me. For the most part, it lacks much concreteness, but when he goes into the discussion of classical liberal theology and then the theology of the Weimar period, his argument becomes very confused and indeed inaccurate. It does not seem at all plausible that Martin Buber and Karl Barth are somehow “complicit” with the rise of Nazism — and in fact, a more realistic reading of the situation is that the Weimar period represents the most profound failure of liberalism in its history.
And typically for liberal denouncers of “totalitarianism” or “political theology” or whatever label is to be applied to the deprecated non-liberal system, he completely ignores the economic factors at work between the wars. The rise of “political theologies” can only seem to be the biggest political problem of our time if we completely depoliticize the (global) economy. Neoliberal restructuring and imposed austerity measures have caused far greater destruction worldwide than the rather pathetic efforts of political Islam — apocalyptic visions don’t just strike at random, they become appealing during times of desperation and hopelessness.
Of course, he dismisses the effort to situate political theology in anything resembling real-world conditions as a naive liberal reaction to what we intrinsically can’t understand — despite the fact that he apparently understands it well enough to write a whole damn book about it.
larvalsubjects Says: August 22, 2007 at 10:51 pm
I can’t speak to his account of the theology of the Weimar period, nor in posting the article am I endorsing all of it. I don’t disagree with your points about economic factors, but you seem to pitch the issue as an either/or. While I don’t believe that political theologies are the “biggest political problem of our time”, I think they can certainly exacerbate a number of other problems and make bad situations even worse. I note that your remarks about apocalyptic visions repeat my analysis of the origins of apocalyptic fantasy posted here back in December. At any rate, suppose that we reworded your third paragraph a bit, introducing a different, less personally charged issue.
And typically for liberal denouncers of “fascism” or “racist ideologies” or whatever label is to be applied to the deprecated non-liberal system, he completely ignores the economic factors at work between the wars. The rise of “racist ideologies” can only seem to be the biggest political problem of our time if we completely depoliticize the (global) economy. Neoliberal restructuring and imposed austerity measures have caused far greater destruction worldwide than the rather pathetic efforts of the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis —visions of race wars don’t just strike at random, they become appealing during times of desperation and hopelessness. Would you endorse this reworded analysis of the economic roots of racism and continue to hold that the real problem is purely economic in nature? Or would you hold that it is clear that racism is a problem that both has roots in economic problems and exacerbates social problems, such that we can’t simply treat one as the [illusory] appearance and the other as the [true] reality, and such that it’s not simply a question of dealing with the one problem [economics] and ignoring the other [racism]? Or some other alternative altogether. In a number of respects, the issue resembles Marx’s claims about abstraction. Yes, the commodity is an abstraction that masks or clothes social relations, making social relations appear as if they were instead relations among things. Yet for Marx this doesn’t entail that abstractions are unreal and without force, such that we can simply peel away the veil and get at the “real truth”.
These points aside, I thoroughly agree with your points about liberalism and the manner in which it completely pushes aside economics and treats issues as simply being a matter of the ideas, political theories, or ideologies various people endorse.
Adam Says: August 22, 2007 at 11:10 pm
I don’t see any particular problem with your rewording, though I’d drop the scare quotes from the terms referring to racism. I also don’t see how by accusing liberals of ignoring the economy, I’m advocating ignoring other problems — the problem is, precisely, ignoring things!
I must say that this article is at least more interestingly wrong than most of what passes for discussion of religion in the popular press.
Adam Says: August 23, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Here’s a quote from Zizek that is closer to the approach I’m advocating:
“Of course, one should fully acknowledge the tremendous liberating impact of the postmodern politicization of domains which were hitherto considered apolitical (feminism, gay and lesbian politics, ecology, ethnic and other so-called minority issues): the fact that these issues not only became perceived as inherently political but also gave birth to new forms of political subjectivization thoroughly reshaped our entire political and cultural landscape. So the point is not to play down this tremendous advance in favour of the return to some new version of so-called economic essentialism: the point is, rather, that the depoliticization of the economy generates the populist New Right with its Moral Majority ideology, which today is the main obstacle to the realization of the very (feminist, ecological…) demands on which postmodern forms of political subjectivization focus. In short, I am pleading for a ‘return to the primacy of the economy’ not to the detriment of the issues raised by postmodern forms of politicization, but precisely in order to create the conditions for the more effective realization of feminist, ecological, and so on, demands.” (Ticklish Subject, 356)
larvalsubjects Says: August 23, 2007 at 3:15 pm
One of the things I find interesting about Zizek is that he has increasingly made these sorts of gestures yet never concretely discusses anything to do with economy. At times I’ve even occasionally wondered whether he’s read any Marx beyond the first chapter of Capital (his analysis in Sublime Object). From the standpoint of a Marxist form of analysis, remarks like the one you cite here are astonishing as he’s abstractly negating these other political forms without giving any account of how this sort of politics arises under contemporary capital. The equivalent would be Marx abstractly denouncing the bourgeois (which he does not) without giving any account of how this class emerged, why a particular political form based on rights emerged with it, etc.
Adam Says: August 23, 2007 at 3:50 pm
I don’t see how he’s negating the other forms of politics.
larvalsubjects Says: August 23, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Rereading the passage more carefully, you’re right, he’s not. His remarks here are far more generous to what he refers to as “postmodern politics” than he often is.
I wonder– and I’m not taking a position –whether the claim that the depoliticization of economy generates the “New Right” or “Moral Majority” ideology isn’t a sweeping generalization. Aren’t these ideologies just the ideologies of the capitalist class pure and simple? And doesn’t that ideology function to clothe economic relations, regardless of whether we’re talking about late 19th and early 20th century political struggles and present-day struggles? It sounds like he’s implicitly making a causal claim: “Because these postmodern forms of politics depoliticized economy they are responsible for the rise of the New Right. If we didn’t engage in these forms of politics but instead politicized economy, the new right wouldn’t exist.” Yet it seems that the “new right” in the sense Zizek is using it existed even in those historical contexts (in the States at least) where economy was politicized (during the great labor movements, and when the Soviet Union was still seen as a real threat). Evidence of this would be found in the way that the reactionary politics of that day was intimately bound up with certain forms of religiosity, nationalism, liberal individualism (”individuals make their destiny and are responsible for their place”, etc), and so on.
Of course, I am not making the claim that economy shouldn’t be a site of the political, just questioning what Zizek often seems to be implicitly saying when he makes these claims. Sadly, socialist movements and the history of Marxism have a pretty abominable record when it comes to feminist issues, race issues, gender issues, etc… The proletariat historically being equivalent to working men over the age of 35 and suspicion and outright hostility often being directed at feminist groups as potential competitors against the “proletariat”. In other words, the apparent universality of the proletariat has tended to function as a veiled particularity describable along the lines of Zizek’s analyses of the universal and the particular in Sublime Object and elsewhere (following Laclau). Part of the worry then is that this position invites a return to that sort of exclusion and perhaps follows the logic of “yes, yes we acknowledge these struggles are important too, but set them aside for the moment to engage in this struggle so that these things might be addressed later (his reference to “creating conditions for more effective modes of engagement with these issues implying deferral and futurity).” I don’t know.
It does seem like there’s something of a break in Zizek’s work, where he shifts from a stance of critique to a stance of praxis. You’ll recall the analysis of master-signifiers following Laclau in Sublime Object where he argues that different ideologies function according to how they fill in the empty master-signifier with a particular content. Thus with a signifier like “freedom” it becomes a site of contestation among competing ideologies, where one ideology fills it with the signifier rights, another, the Marxist, economics, another, the ecologist, with environment, another, gender issues, and so on. During that period he was arguing that the aim should be an ethics of the real that holds the master-signifier and objet a at a distance from one another. Marx is included in this, or is at least among his examples.
When we get to Ticklish Subject and beyond, we suddenly see Zizek doing precisely the thing he prescribed against in his earlier work, turning economy into the content that fills out the empty signifier. In the forward to the revised edition of For They Know Not What They Do (arguably his best and most rigorous book, in my view), he speaks about how he labored for a long time to rid himself of the last vestiges of bourgeois ideology and explicitly connects this ideology to Laclau. Now he seems to be striving to synthesize these two positions with concepts like the parallax (which can also be seen as an implicit critique of his early work: focus on the politic caused the economic to fall out of view in his earlier work). That is, he’s trying to think a sort of “both/and”. It would be interesting to work out the details of this trajectory and why his work has shifted in this way.
Adam Says: August 23, 2007 at 9:39 pm
I disagree with that characterization of Zizek’s trajectory. In my reading, he starts with advocacy of liberalism, then rejects it in Tarrying, without having anything positive to put in its place (certainly not traditional communism) — inaugurating a period of “retreat into theory,” where he tries to work out in greater detail the notion of the “cure,” the rise of the big Other, etc. In Ticklish Subject, through his encounter with Badiou, he is challenged to think of a way to get at a “politics of truth” that would be more than simply trading in one master for another, and he’s trying to work out what the emergence of a “politics of truth” might look like in his three Christian books. The Parallax View would then be the “negation of negation,” where he embraces the rejection of the present order (liberalism, capitalism) as directly being the politics he is looking for — politics of refusal, Bartleby, etc.
All of your stuff in a previous thread about his “nostalgia” for party politics or whatever is a blind alley — he’s mining the Marxist tradition, trying to work through “what went wrong.” And the core problem, ironically enough, is primarily economic determinism, the idea that capitalism (or the process of history) is somehow automatically going to achieve everything for us — meaning that it wasn’t just Stalin who betrayed Marx, it was Marx himself.
larvalsubjects Says: August 23, 2007 at 9:58 pm
All of your stuff in a previous thread about his “nostalgia” for party politics or whatever is a blind alley — he’s mining the Marxist tradition, trying to work through “what went wrong.” And the core problem, ironically enough, is primarily economic determinism, the idea that capitalism (or the process of history) is somehow automatically going to achieve everything for us — meaning that it wasn’t just Stalin who betrayed Marx, it was Marx himself.
I understand this. However, it just so happens that Zizek’s solutions or alternative to what went wrong are often the very thing that went wrong!
I’ve become fairly skeptical of the what’s expressed in your final sentence. While I don’t endorse economic or historical determinism, I do feel these forces place important limits on what is possible in a given situation. The emergence of the great revolutions in the past were not simply the result of “subjects of truth” bearing fidelity to an event, or other subjects passing to the act. There were massively changing economic, technological, and social conditions that rendered the situation open to these forms of engagement. Analysis of these conditions is, in my view, almost completely lacking in Zizek and Badiou.
larvalsubjects Says: August 23, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Or to put it differently, Badiou-Zizek’s “solution” shares little resemblance to Marx and even looks like the core of liberal capitalist ideology in certain respects. There’s that terrific passage in Capital– “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret” –where Marx remarks that Protestant Christianity is the perfect religion for capitalism:
For a society of commodity producers, whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this material form bring their individual, private labours into relation with each other as homogenous human labour, Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e. in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion. In the ancient Asiatic, Classical-antique, and other such modes of production, the transformation of the product into a commodity, and therefore men’s existence as producers of commodities, plays a subordinate role, which however increases in importance as these communities approach nearer and nearer to the stage of their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist only in the interstices of the ancient world, like the gods of Epicurus in the intermundia, or Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are much more simple and transparent than those of bourgeois society. But they are founded either on the immaturity of man as an individual, when he has not yet torn himself loose from the ummbilical cord of his natural species-connection with other men, or on direct relations of dominance and servitude. They are conditioned by a low stage of development of the productive powers of labour and correspondingly limited relations between men within the process of creating and reproducing their material life, hence also limited relations between men and nature. These real limitations are reflected in the ancient worship of nature, and in other elements of tribal religions. The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control. This, however, requires that society posses a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product of a long and tormented historical development. (Fowkes trans, 172-173) The operative words here are “cult of man in the abstract”, where the subject is conceived as separate and independent of his social and historical relations, i.e., bourgeois individualism reflected in the “personal relationship with God” and the ahistoricism of these religious movements. Yet how are Badiou and Zizek not simply giving us simply a secular form of this structure or phenomenon, and thereby reproducing, at a certain level of social relations, the very thing they claim to be targeting? Isn’t the subject of truth and subtraction identical to the “cult of man in the abstract”? Of course, each of these developments has its own potentialities.
Adam Says: August 23, 2007 at 11:59 pm
By economic determinism, I meant the idea that capitalism would inevitably produce a new, higher mode of production that could somehow maintain capitalism’s dynamism without its contradictions.
I seriously think that the only “positive” political program Zizek has put forward is the Bartleby thing at the end of Parallax — and there is definitely room to critique that move on his part. He is also skeptical about whether it really is possible to challenge global capital wholesale in the present circumstances, and so he is spending his time trying to discern the possible formal structure of a movement that could challenge capital.
I heard him say at a lecture that what we need to do right now is more theory. Someone then asked him, “But what do we do?” And he said, “The theory will tell us what to do!” So to me, it’s jumping to conclusions to directly critique Zizek’s “political views” right now, because he doesn’t have positive political views — if you want to critique him, critique that (and that is worthy of critique — remember Jodi’s frustration with the Bartleby stuff?).
And finally, I am one of the few holdouts who insists that we need to rigorously distinguish between Zizek and Badiou. I understand that this is a minority opinion, but still — when I see the words “Zizek and Badiou,” I reach for my gun.
Alex Says: August 20, 2007 at 11:16 am
Frankly, many would argue that the problem is that only when it is political (that is concerned with the public sphere and the community at large) is religion and certainly Western religion, religion at all.
I’ve only skim read the article, and I know it is a magazine piece, but I can’t help but think that any article about political theology that stops with Barth is kind of missing quite a chunk of (Christian) political theology, you know, the bit where all recent and important stuff has been said, attempting to react to the modern situation. Any article on this stuff that doesn’t mention, say, Yoder, Hauerwas and “The Desire of Nations”, seems to be incredibly lacking. To be honest, with this in mind, I don’t know if it is “well worth a read”.
Adam Says: August 22, 2007 at 10:25 pm
In fairness to the author, the article is apparently a condensation of a book-length argument.
That said, as it stands, it is unconvincing to me. For the most part, it lacks much concreteness, but when he goes into the discussion of classical liberal theology and then the theology of the Weimar period, his argument becomes very confused and indeed inaccurate. It does not seem at all plausible that Martin Buber and Karl Barth are somehow “complicit” with the rise of Nazism — and in fact, a more realistic reading of the situation is that the Weimar period represents the most profound failure of liberalism in its history.
And typically for liberal denouncers of “totalitarianism” or “political theology” or whatever label is to be applied to the deprecated non-liberal system, he completely ignores the economic factors at work between the wars. The rise of “political theologies” can only seem to be the biggest political problem of our time if we completely depoliticize the (global) economy. Neoliberal restructuring and imposed austerity measures have caused far greater destruction worldwide than the rather pathetic efforts of political Islam — apocalyptic visions don’t just strike at random, they become appealing during times of desperation and hopelessness.
Of course, he dismisses the effort to situate political theology in anything resembling real-world conditions as a naive liberal reaction to what we intrinsically can’t understand — despite the fact that he apparently understands it well enough to write a whole damn book about it.
larvalsubjects Says: August 22, 2007 at 10:51 pm
I can’t speak to his account of the theology of the Weimar period, nor in posting the article am I endorsing all of it. I don’t disagree with your points about economic factors, but you seem to pitch the issue as an either/or. While I don’t believe that political theologies are the “biggest political problem of our time”, I think they can certainly exacerbate a number of other problems and make bad situations even worse. I note that your remarks about apocalyptic visions repeat my analysis of the origins of apocalyptic fantasy posted here back in December. At any rate, suppose that we reworded your third paragraph a bit, introducing a different, less personally charged issue.
And typically for liberal denouncers of “fascism” or “racist ideologies” or whatever label is to be applied to the deprecated non-liberal system, he completely ignores the economic factors at work between the wars. The rise of “racist ideologies” can only seem to be the biggest political problem of our time if we completely depoliticize the (global) economy. Neoliberal restructuring and imposed austerity measures have caused far greater destruction worldwide than the rather pathetic efforts of the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis —visions of race wars don’t just strike at random, they become appealing during times of desperation and hopelessness. Would you endorse this reworded analysis of the economic roots of racism and continue to hold that the real problem is purely economic in nature? Or would you hold that it is clear that racism is a problem that both has roots in economic problems and exacerbates social problems, such that we can’t simply treat one as the [illusory] appearance and the other as the [true] reality, and such that it’s not simply a question of dealing with the one problem [economics] and ignoring the other [racism]? Or some other alternative altogether. In a number of respects, the issue resembles Marx’s claims about abstraction. Yes, the commodity is an abstraction that masks or clothes social relations, making social relations appear as if they were instead relations among things. Yet for Marx this doesn’t entail that abstractions are unreal and without force, such that we can simply peel away the veil and get at the “real truth”.
These points aside, I thoroughly agree with your points about liberalism and the manner in which it completely pushes aside economics and treats issues as simply being a matter of the ideas, political theories, or ideologies various people endorse.
Adam Says: August 22, 2007 at 11:10 pm
I don’t see any particular problem with your rewording, though I’d drop the scare quotes from the terms referring to racism. I also don’t see how by accusing liberals of ignoring the economy, I’m advocating ignoring other problems — the problem is, precisely, ignoring things!
I must say that this article is at least more interestingly wrong than most of what passes for discussion of religion in the popular press.
Adam Says: August 23, 2007 at 3:09 pm
Here’s a quote from Zizek that is closer to the approach I’m advocating:
“Of course, one should fully acknowledge the tremendous liberating impact of the postmodern politicization of domains which were hitherto considered apolitical (feminism, gay and lesbian politics, ecology, ethnic and other so-called minority issues): the fact that these issues not only became perceived as inherently political but also gave birth to new forms of political subjectivization thoroughly reshaped our entire political and cultural landscape. So the point is not to play down this tremendous advance in favour of the return to some new version of so-called economic essentialism: the point is, rather, that the depoliticization of the economy generates the populist New Right with its Moral Majority ideology, which today is the main obstacle to the realization of the very (feminist, ecological…) demands on which postmodern forms of political subjectivization focus. In short, I am pleading for a ‘return to the primacy of the economy’ not to the detriment of the issues raised by postmodern forms of politicization, but precisely in order to create the conditions for the more effective realization of feminist, ecological, and so on, demands.” (Ticklish Subject, 356)
larvalsubjects Says: August 23, 2007 at 3:15 pm
One of the things I find interesting about Zizek is that he has increasingly made these sorts of gestures yet never concretely discusses anything to do with economy. At times I’ve even occasionally wondered whether he’s read any Marx beyond the first chapter of Capital (his analysis in Sublime Object). From the standpoint of a Marxist form of analysis, remarks like the one you cite here are astonishing as he’s abstractly negating these other political forms without giving any account of how this sort of politics arises under contemporary capital. The equivalent would be Marx abstractly denouncing the bourgeois (which he does not) without giving any account of how this class emerged, why a particular political form based on rights emerged with it, etc.
Adam Says: August 23, 2007 at 3:50 pm
I don’t see how he’s negating the other forms of politics.
larvalsubjects Says: August 23, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Rereading the passage more carefully, you’re right, he’s not. His remarks here are far more generous to what he refers to as “postmodern politics” than he often is.
I wonder– and I’m not taking a position –whether the claim that the depoliticization of economy generates the “New Right” or “Moral Majority” ideology isn’t a sweeping generalization. Aren’t these ideologies just the ideologies of the capitalist class pure and simple? And doesn’t that ideology function to clothe economic relations, regardless of whether we’re talking about late 19th and early 20th century political struggles and present-day struggles? It sounds like he’s implicitly making a causal claim: “Because these postmodern forms of politics depoliticized economy they are responsible for the rise of the New Right. If we didn’t engage in these forms of politics but instead politicized economy, the new right wouldn’t exist.” Yet it seems that the “new right” in the sense Zizek is using it existed even in those historical contexts (in the States at least) where economy was politicized (during the great labor movements, and when the Soviet Union was still seen as a real threat). Evidence of this would be found in the way that the reactionary politics of that day was intimately bound up with certain forms of religiosity, nationalism, liberal individualism (”individuals make their destiny and are responsible for their place”, etc), and so on.
Of course, I am not making the claim that economy shouldn’t be a site of the political, just questioning what Zizek often seems to be implicitly saying when he makes these claims. Sadly, socialist movements and the history of Marxism have a pretty abominable record when it comes to feminist issues, race issues, gender issues, etc… The proletariat historically being equivalent to working men over the age of 35 and suspicion and outright hostility often being directed at feminist groups as potential competitors against the “proletariat”. In other words, the apparent universality of the proletariat has tended to function as a veiled particularity describable along the lines of Zizek’s analyses of the universal and the particular in Sublime Object and elsewhere (following Laclau). Part of the worry then is that this position invites a return to that sort of exclusion and perhaps follows the logic of “yes, yes we acknowledge these struggles are important too, but set them aside for the moment to engage in this struggle so that these things might be addressed later (his reference to “creating conditions for more effective modes of engagement with these issues implying deferral and futurity).” I don’t know.
It does seem like there’s something of a break in Zizek’s work, where he shifts from a stance of critique to a stance of praxis. You’ll recall the analysis of master-signifiers following Laclau in Sublime Object where he argues that different ideologies function according to how they fill in the empty master-signifier with a particular content. Thus with a signifier like “freedom” it becomes a site of contestation among competing ideologies, where one ideology fills it with the signifier rights, another, the Marxist, economics, another, the ecologist, with environment, another, gender issues, and so on. During that period he was arguing that the aim should be an ethics of the real that holds the master-signifier and objet a at a distance from one another. Marx is included in this, or is at least among his examples.
When we get to Ticklish Subject and beyond, we suddenly see Zizek doing precisely the thing he prescribed against in his earlier work, turning economy into the content that fills out the empty signifier. In the forward to the revised edition of For They Know Not What They Do (arguably his best and most rigorous book, in my view), he speaks about how he labored for a long time to rid himself of the last vestiges of bourgeois ideology and explicitly connects this ideology to Laclau. Now he seems to be striving to synthesize these two positions with concepts like the parallax (which can also be seen as an implicit critique of his early work: focus on the politic caused the economic to fall out of view in his earlier work). That is, he’s trying to think a sort of “both/and”. It would be interesting to work out the details of this trajectory and why his work has shifted in this way.
Adam Says: August 23, 2007 at 9:39 pm
I disagree with that characterization of Zizek’s trajectory. In my reading, he starts with advocacy of liberalism, then rejects it in Tarrying, without having anything positive to put in its place (certainly not traditional communism) — inaugurating a period of “retreat into theory,” where he tries to work out in greater detail the notion of the “cure,” the rise of the big Other, etc. In Ticklish Subject, through his encounter with Badiou, he is challenged to think of a way to get at a “politics of truth” that would be more than simply trading in one master for another, and he’s trying to work out what the emergence of a “politics of truth” might look like in his three Christian books. The Parallax View would then be the “negation of negation,” where he embraces the rejection of the present order (liberalism, capitalism) as directly being the politics he is looking for — politics of refusal, Bartleby, etc.
All of your stuff in a previous thread about his “nostalgia” for party politics or whatever is a blind alley — he’s mining the Marxist tradition, trying to work through “what went wrong.” And the core problem, ironically enough, is primarily economic determinism, the idea that capitalism (or the process of history) is somehow automatically going to achieve everything for us — meaning that it wasn’t just Stalin who betrayed Marx, it was Marx himself.
larvalsubjects Says: August 23, 2007 at 9:58 pm
All of your stuff in a previous thread about his “nostalgia” for party politics or whatever is a blind alley — he’s mining the Marxist tradition, trying to work through “what went wrong.” And the core problem, ironically enough, is primarily economic determinism, the idea that capitalism (or the process of history) is somehow automatically going to achieve everything for us — meaning that it wasn’t just Stalin who betrayed Marx, it was Marx himself.
I understand this. However, it just so happens that Zizek’s solutions or alternative to what went wrong are often the very thing that went wrong!
I’ve become fairly skeptical of the what’s expressed in your final sentence. While I don’t endorse economic or historical determinism, I do feel these forces place important limits on what is possible in a given situation. The emergence of the great revolutions in the past were not simply the result of “subjects of truth” bearing fidelity to an event, or other subjects passing to the act. There were massively changing economic, technological, and social conditions that rendered the situation open to these forms of engagement. Analysis of these conditions is, in my view, almost completely lacking in Zizek and Badiou.
larvalsubjects Says: August 23, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Or to put it differently, Badiou-Zizek’s “solution” shares little resemblance to Marx and even looks like the core of liberal capitalist ideology in certain respects. There’s that terrific passage in Capital– “The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret” –where Marx remarks that Protestant Christianity is the perfect religion for capitalism:
For a society of commodity producers, whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this material form bring their individual, private labours into relation with each other as homogenous human labour, Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e. in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion. In the ancient Asiatic, Classical-antique, and other such modes of production, the transformation of the product into a commodity, and therefore men’s existence as producers of commodities, plays a subordinate role, which however increases in importance as these communities approach nearer and nearer to the stage of their dissolution. Trading nations, properly so called, exist only in the interstices of the ancient world, like the gods of Epicurus in the intermundia, or Jews in the pores of Polish society. Those ancient social organisms of production are much more simple and transparent than those of bourgeois society. But they are founded either on the immaturity of man as an individual, when he has not yet torn himself loose from the ummbilical cord of his natural species-connection with other men, or on direct relations of dominance and servitude. They are conditioned by a low stage of development of the productive powers of labour and correspondingly limited relations between men within the process of creating and reproducing their material life, hence also limited relations between men and nature. These real limitations are reflected in the ancient worship of nature, and in other elements of tribal religions. The religious reflections of the real world can, in any case, vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of the social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control. This, however, requires that society posses a material foundation, or a series of material conditions of existence, which in their turn are the natural and spontaneous product of a long and tormented historical development. (Fowkes trans, 172-173) The operative words here are “cult of man in the abstract”, where the subject is conceived as separate and independent of his social and historical relations, i.e., bourgeois individualism reflected in the “personal relationship with God” and the ahistoricism of these religious movements. Yet how are Badiou and Zizek not simply giving us simply a secular form of this structure or phenomenon, and thereby reproducing, at a certain level of social relations, the very thing they claim to be targeting? Isn’t the subject of truth and subtraction identical to the “cult of man in the abstract”? Of course, each of these developments has its own potentialities.
Adam Says: August 23, 2007 at 11:59 pm
By economic determinism, I meant the idea that capitalism would inevitably produce a new, higher mode of production that could somehow maintain capitalism’s dynamism without its contradictions.
I seriously think that the only “positive” political program Zizek has put forward is the Bartleby thing at the end of Parallax — and there is definitely room to critique that move on his part. He is also skeptical about whether it really is possible to challenge global capital wholesale in the present circumstances, and so he is spending his time trying to discern the possible formal structure of a movement that could challenge capital.
I heard him say at a lecture that what we need to do right now is more theory. Someone then asked him, “But what do we do?” And he said, “The theory will tell us what to do!” So to me, it’s jumping to conclusions to directly critique Zizek’s “political views” right now, because he doesn’t have positive political views — if you want to critique him, critique that (and that is worthy of critique — remember Jodi’s frustration with the Bartleby stuff?).
And finally, I am one of the few holdouts who insists that we need to rigorously distinguish between Zizek and Badiou. I understand that this is a minority opinion, but still — when I see the words “Zizek and Badiou,” I reach for my gun.
No comments:
Post a Comment