Slavoj Žižek and Radical Politics

Sean Homer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317243717
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

In this book, Sean Homer addresses Slavoj Žižek's work in a specific political conjuncture, his political interventions in the Balkans. The charge of inconsistency and contradiction is frequently levelled at Žižek's politics, a charge he openly embraces in the name of "pragmatism." Homer argues that his interventions in the Balkans expose the dangers of this pragmatism for the renewal of the Leftist politics that he calls for. The book assesses Žižek's political interventions in so far as they advance his self-proclaimed "ruthlessly radical" aims about changing the world. Homer argues the Balkans can be seen as Žižek's symptom, that element which does not fit into the system, but speaks its truth and reveals what the system cannot acknowledge about itself.

In Part II Homer explores Žižek's radicalism through his critique of Alain Badiou, arguing that Badiou's "affirmationism" provides a firmer grounding for the renewal of the left than Žižek's negative gesture analyzed in Part I. What distinguishes Žižek from the majority of the contemporary Left today is his valorization of violence; Homer tackles this issue head-on in relation to political violence in Greece. Finally, Homer defends the utopian impulse on the radical left against its Lacanian critics.

PART I Žižek in the Balkans

INTRODUCTION The case of Kosovo

It could be argued that the issues discussed in the first part of this book are dead and buried; in the words of Adrian Johnston, these “non-textual interventions and socio-political situations are long forgotten by everyone save for a few specialist intellectual historians and biographers” (Johnston 2009, p. xxii). So, why resurrect these debates yet again today?

The answer is simple. Žižek continues to return to these “socio-political situations” himself, he continues to attack what he perceives to be the position of the Western European left on the Balkans and these views are then recycled by his followers. In one of the earliest and most prescient critiques of Žižek, Peter Dews (1995) observed that there was a peculiar ambiguity in his political profile between “marxisant cultural critic on the international stage, member of the neo-liberal and nationalistically inclined governing party back home” (ibid., p. 26).

This became very apparent in 1999 when Žižek published a response to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) bombing of Serbia (Žižek 1999a), or rather, the first of many responses, as his position changed depending upon whom he was addressing at the time (Chapter 1). Žižek continues to advocate a series of conservative political positions within the Balkans in contrast to the radicalism of his more widely disseminated texts and interviews. An adherence to the State, which in Žižek's own estimation differentiates him from all other manifestations of the radical left today, results in him continuing to support governments long after they have abandoned any pretense at radicalism. Indeed, over the intervening two decades the discrepancy between Žižek's domestic and international profiles has become more pronounced. Žižek has remained, to the best of my knowledge, completely silent on the violent anti-austerity protests in Slovenia in 2012, in marked contrast to his high public profile in Greece and immediate response to the more recent protests in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2014 (Žižek 2014a, 2014b). Žižek, as we will see below, advances “pragmatic” solutions to the ongoing conflicts and crises in the Balkans, which he characterizes as getting his hands dirty and facing up to the realities of political power, in contrast to academic leftists. However, these solutions are often contradictory and at times indistinguishable from the right. It is conceivable that Žižek underwent an understandable, and even justifiable, conservative phase after the collapse of the Soviet Union and disintegration of Yugoslavia, and that he has now returned to his radical roots. If we consider the case of Kosovo, however, or his continuing support for SYRIZA (the Coalition of the Radical Left and Movements) in Greece (see the Introduction to Part II), this does not appear to be so. Despite the twists and turns of his thoughts on the Balkans there is an underlying consistency to his positions and these tend to be reactionary. The Balkans, in this sense, can be seen as Žižek's symptom, that element which does not fit into the system but speaks its truth and reveals what the system cannot acknowledge about itself. Let me now turn to the case of Kosovo.

The case of Kosovo

In 2013 Žižek co-authored a book with Agon Hamza entitled From Myth to Symptom_ The Case of Kosovo. In their joint introduction the authors argued that the book goes to the core of the Kosovo problem by locating it with respect to two crucial political and ideological conjunctures: the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s and the developments that followed thereafter. Furthermore:

The underlying premise of these papers is that the occurrences in the former Yugoslavia, starting from its disintegration two [sic] the independence of Kosovo cannot be accounted for by any of the existing dominant paradigms that build their arguments around notions of ethnicity and culture.

(Žižek & Hamza 2013, p. 11)

Žižek and Hamza argue, correctly I believe, that the neo-imperialist “universal values” being imposed upon Kosovo, such as democracy and multi-ethnicity, and the emergence of local nationalism are simply two sides of the same coin, and it is perhaps time to question what they call “democracy without the people” (Žižek and Hamza 2013, p. 14). The aim of the book is twofold:

First, to break with the sophism of the post-modern tradition of de-politicising and culturalising the “case of Kosovo,” as well as to break away from its supplement: that of the ethno-centric reasoning. Second, for the first time ever, it aims to provide a leftist reading of a country which has been subject to all sorts of (neo)imperial interventions and experiments.

(Žižek & Hamza 2013, p. 13)

Leaving to one side the rather questionable claim that this is the first leftist analysis of the Kosovo question ever, we might ask what exactly the novelty of their approach is. Žižek and Hamza's alternative is to study what actually happened in the country and engage “in critical analysis of the existing state by rendering visible its limitations, inconsistencies and obscenities” (Žižek and Hamza 2013, p. 15). This all sounds fine until we turn to Žižek's actual contribution.¹

Žižek's contribution, “NATO as the left hand of God,” was first published over a decade earlier (Žižek 1999b), and it is reproduced here with a number of emendations. Žižek has changed references to the “Yugoslav democratic government” to “Serb ‘democratic opposition’” (Žižek & Hamza 2013, p. 39), as if the two were simply the same thing and interchangeable. He has also added John Pilger (along with Tariq Ali and Alain Badiou) to his list of misguided leftists who opposed the NATO bombing, accusing Pilger and Badiou of inverted racism (ibid., pp. 22–23).² A large part of the essay is not directly related to the present situation in Kosovo at all; it is simply a cut and paste of material published elsewhere on Abu Ghraib and the “War on Terror.” Finally, the more recent version drops the Bartleby solution to the problem which he advocated in 1999, as his faith in “do-nothing” politics seems to have waned.

Žižek's piece, thus, can be seen to offer us an analysis of the first of the two crucial political and ideological conjunctures, the NATO bombing of the former Yugoslavia in the late 1990s, and restates his longstanding position supporting and justifying NATO intervention, but it does not offer a “concrete” analysis of the situation in Kosovo today. It is not at all clear to me how this squares with Hamza's view of “strange leftist individuals” who support NATO (Žižek & Hamza 2013, p. 84, note 63), but I will leave that to one side. Žižek's ire, as always, is directed as much against the Western European left as the right, and his charge of racism against Pilger and Badiou is scurrilous. Pilger may, as Žižek points out (Žižek & Hamza 2013, p. 22), be wrong in this particular instance regarding the former Yugoslavia, but he is a figure of the left who has a long history of fighting racism within his own country, as does Badiou, and which sadly Žižek does not (see Chapter 3). Hamza pursues this line further:

This is where the (Western) left got it wrong. It is all too easy to criticise the NATO bombing, indeed it was fashionable and almost everybody did it. In 1939 Max Horkheimer wrote “whoever is not prepared to talk about capitalism should also remain silent about fascism.” The same should apply to the (Western) left: “whoever is not prepared to talk about the apartheid of the 90s [in the former Yugoslavia], should also remain silent about the NATO bombing.”

(Žižek & Hamza 2013, p. 98)

I am not sure where Hamza was during the late 1990s, but in the North of England, where I then lived, opposition to the NATO bombing was far from “fashionable.” The demonstrations against the bombing were some of the smallest I ever supported and, as I argue later, the left was deeply divided over the issue (Chapter 1). Furthermore, from my own experience, the left that opposed the bombing also supported the opposition movements in the former Yugoslavia, including Kosovo. There were surely some on the left who maintained illusions about the Milošević regime, but these were a minority.³

Žižek's contribution to the volume offers a robust critique of the depoliticization of the discourse of human rights and the logic of victimization, insofar as the ideal subject-victim is always a non-political subject. The ultimate paradox of victimization, he writes, is that “the other is good INSOFAR AS IT REMAINS A VICTIM” (Žižek & Hamza 2013, p. 32, emphasis in the original). It is this depoliticized discourse that both the humanitarian opposition to NATO and the left shared, and to which Žižek opposes his own solution:

The way to fight the capitalist New World Order is not by supporting local proto-Fascist resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious question today: how to build TRANSNATIONAL political movements and institutions strong enough to seriously constraint [sic] the unlimited rule of the [sic] capital, and to render visible and politically relevant the fact that the local fundamentalist resistances against the New World Order, from Milošević to le Pen and the extreme right in Europe, are part of it.

(Žižek 1999b, n.p., emphasis in the original)

This is entirely consistent with Žižek's position in 2013 (Žižek & Hamza 2013, p. 44), but what he leaves out of the reprinted version of the paper is his suggestion that the only viable solution for Kosovo is the ethnic partition of the country:

To avoid any misunderstanding: the Albanian cleansing of the Serbs is to be unequivocally condemned and prevented—however, one should also make the next logical step and simply accept that, in the present situation of the ethnic hatred, the “cantonization” of Kosovo into an Albanian and a Serb part is the only viable solution.

(Žižek 1999b, n.p.)

The question surely arises as to how we are to square this call for ethnic partition as the only viable solution with the first serious leftist critique that rejects the “ethnicization” and “culturization” of what is undeniably a political issue. Indeed, in 2001 Žižek repeated this argument word for word and praised the West for its “wise” decision to accept the de facto partition of Bosnia into three separate entities. This was not, however, a consequence of the ethnocentric reasoning of Western leaders but the result of their “nostalgic dream of the ‘multiethnic’ Yugoslavia; Kosovo is the last piece of the ex-Yugoslavia where this dream can still be enacted” (Žižek 2001). It is certainly possible, as I mentioned above, that Žižek's views have, not unreasonably, changed over the past decade, and his enthusiasm for ethnically divided states has been replaced by a belief in genuinely internationalist solidarity. However, from his public pronouncements this does not appear to be the case.

In a number of interviews that Žižek has given on the issue of the Balkans, including one with Hamza himself, he suggests that the only viable, pragmatic solution to Kosovo and the wider region is its partition into ethnically homogeneous states.⁴ Shortly after the publication of From Myth to Symptom, Hamza conducted an interview with Žižek which addressed many of the issues covered in the book. Žižek's “logical” proposal to the “illogical,” “disordered” and “unstable” solution of multiethnic states was:

Here maybe foreign help is needed to prevent explosions. Why not give a little bit of that Mitrovica and so on [a Serb-dominated area in north Kosovo] to Serbia, maybe they can give you a little bit of the South-West of Serbia [where Albanians live] … Wouldn't this be a much more, how to put it, a logical stable world. I think this problem is not insolvable [sic] in this sense. It can be done.

(Quoted in Plavšić 2014b)

Žižek goes on to suggest the formation of a greater Albania⁵ and the partition of Macedonia between a greater Albania and greater Bulgaria:

If they [the Macedonians] really want, as I hear, some kind of unification with Bulgaria, then I would be brutal enough to say that this kind of restructuring of larger Albania, larger united Macedonia/Bulgaria, with all the necessary friendly, not brutally imposed, exchanges of territory with Serbia, what is bad about it, my God? I'm a pragmatic [sic] here.

(Quoted in Plavšić 2014b)

Alternatively, we might ask, what is good about this solution? Like Plavšić, I have never heard any Macedonians express the wish to be unified with Bulgaria, but, be that as it may, why stop there? Approximately 25% of the Macedonian population is ethnically Albanian and one can only presume from Žižek's “brutal” logic that this part of the country will be united with a greater Albania along with Kosovo. There is also a significant Greek-speaking population in southern Albania, which can be united with a greater Greece, as the ethnically Turkish population of Greek Thrace can be reunited with Turkey and so on. Žižek seems already to have accep...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• PART I Žižek in the Balkans
• PART II Radicalizing Žižek
• Index