Zizek gives a dazzling show but behind the performance is a passionate commitment to returning philosophical thought to political work
Zizek gives a dazzling show; but behind the performance is a passionate commitment to returning philosophical thought to political work.Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? is a collection of essays in which totalitarianism is treated conceptually rather than historically. Zizek explicitly sidelines the notion, because it acts as a block to all talk of radical political projects. To acknowledge the term “totalitarianism” is, he argues, to embrace the “liberal democratic horizon”. He goes on to dismantle the idea that fascism and socialism under Stalin were totalitarian in the same way.Zizek points out that Nazism and Stalinism were structurally and intentionally different.
He gives a brilliant analysis of Bukharin’s confession (while on hunger-strike) at his 1937 show trial. It highlights the theatrical formalism of Stalinism: it is more important that Bukharin adheres to the formality of confession for the sake of the party’s purges than that Stalin believes in his guilt. Bukharin is happy to die for the party but distraught at the idea that Stalin really believes him guilty. Stalin’s readiness to accept this revealed gap is, in effect, “when the party commits suicide”.Zizek argues that while “today capitalism defines and structures the totality of human civilisation”, every Communist territory was and is a “liberated territory”. So, despite its failure and horrors, Stalinism contains sufficient “radical ambiguity” that, “even at its most ‘totalitarian’ “, it still “exudes an emancipatory potential”. It is the very paranoid irrationalism of Stalinist terror, “in contrast to Fascism”, that reveals it as the “perverted authentic revolution”.Zizek argues that Lenin going all-out for revolution in 1917 was a pure, autonomous and “ethical” act in the Kantian sense, while Stalin embraced perverse cruelty in the guise of ethical duty. While Stalin is the ethical obverse to Lenin, Stalinism remained redeemable in ways that Nazism never was or could be.Zizek’s thinking is formed from deep philosophical engagements with Lacan and Hegel, but is aimed at recovering politics.
He ridicules the “nostalgic Left’s” absurdly formulaic approach, such as support for the populist nationalism of Milosevic against the spirit of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Worse, though, is the embrace of so-called economic and political realism by governments of the centre-left. Zizek demolishes the deluded defeatism in such “realism”, piling up exceptions in order to ask: whose reality?Zizek takes on allcomers armed with his usual scope of reference. He lambasts “cultural studies” for its absolute relativism while praising science writers for addressing fundamental questions. But he correctly points out that the latter miss the “paradox of a Truth that relies on an engaged subjective position”.
