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This is pretty damning. Is it fair? Substantive replies only; full name in the author line and a valid e-mail address required.
I haven't read enough Žižek to adjudicate but as a general rule one should be suspicious of any public intellectual who publishes as often as Charles Bukowski.
I think he is pretty fair with Zizek since Gray speaks Zizekian: in my view it is only (from) the last paragraphs where it is possible to get an understanding (of the previous ones.) And from that point of view it could be possible to read Gray's critique of Zizek as an auto-parody. (PLaying Zizek). I think so.
Zizek on Zizek is damning enough:
“Gray speaks Zizekian”
I’m not sure he’s totally fluent, though. For instance, this seems like a mistranslation:
"There is a problem at this point, however: Why should anyone adopt Žižek’s ideas rather than any others? The answer cannot be that Žižek’s are true in any traditional sense. “The truth we are dealing with here is not ‘objective’ truth,” Žižek writes, “but the self-relating truth about one’s own subjective position; as such, it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation.”
"If this means anything, it is that truth is determined by reference to how an idea accords with the projects to which the speaker is committed—in Žižek’s case, a project of revolution."
I haven’t read the text in question (though I’ve read lots of Zizek) but I really doubt Gray’s gloss is accurate. At the very least, I don’t think Zizek’s “the way it affects the subjective position…” is equivalent to Gray’s “how [it] accords with the projects…”
And it’s definitely not clear how Gray’s conclusion about Zizek’s reading of Stalin’s invention of a sub-kulak category (which sounded quite interesting, I thought) is fair:
"The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became a kind of complex “hermeneutics of suspicion,” of identifying an individual’s “true political attitudes” hidden beneath his or her deceptive public proclamations.
"Describing mass murder in this way as an exercise in hermeneutics is repugnant and grotesque…"
It really doesn’t sound like Zizek was describing the mass murder as such in terms of an exercise in hermeneutics, let alone equating the two (which sounds like the way Gray took it).
Gray’s concerns about Zizek’s rhetoric of violence are probably fair, but I found them uncompelling. I can’t imagine that any reader of Zizek is going to forget, or change their mind about, what the true problem of Nazism (or the Khmer Rouge or Stalin’s regime) really was. So I’m OK with his focusing on (and condemning) alternate negative aspects. As Gray admits, it’s not like Zizek ever offers encomia for really-existing violence; he always finds something to condemn—just not the same things everybody already, rightly, does condemn. But maybe these are famous last words, and some contemporary fascists will start citing Less Than Nothing, in which case I’d admit I was wrong.
What’s most unfair, and supremely irksome, is Gray’s constant return to the fact—and it is a clearcut, unambiguous fact—that Zizek offers no positive political vision or program or agenda. Why is that so hard for him to tolerate? I’d be curious to hear from other political philosophers. Is it a basic norm/standard in that discipline that the absence of a positive program is an automatic detriment or blemish in the context of political critique? To me it seems quite familiar (Socrates, Nietzsche), which doesn’t mean it’s automatically correct, of course. But I think it’s odd that Gray finds it so novel and, evidently, scandalous.
Is it ever fair to criticize an author for failing to do something that they loudly profess to be uninterested in doing (something, in fact, by the rejection of which they define their intellectual project)? To me it has the feeling of harping again and again on the lack of figural representation at the Armory Show, of plots in Finnegan’s Wake, or of melodies in Schoenberg. And I don’t mean that Zizek is a non-discursive or (totally) impressionistic writer, so perhaps I should add an analogy: it feels like complaining about the absence of metaphysica generalis in the First Critique.
As someone who was (very) briefly swept up in the Zizek hype, I would say that this is pretty accurate. I actually think this puts Zizek's celebration of violence in pretty stark terms. I never saw him as a potentially dangerous character until this article.
It should be said, though, that Zizek has written so much that it's hard to sum up what he's about. But I think that sort of prodigious writing is probably partially an attempt at a defense against legitimate criticisms like the ones Gray is making. Any criticism can be sloughed off by claiming that the person making it hasn't made an attempt to understand the author's entire oeuvre. Which is what I think he and his acolytes will probably do.
This is totally unfair:
"With its sweeping claims and magniloquent rhetoric, this passage is typical of much in Žižek’s work. What he describes as the premise of the book is simple only because it passes over historical facts. Reading it, no one would suspect that, putting aside the killings of many millions for ideological reasons, some of the last century’s worst ecological disasters—the destruction of nature in the former Soviet Union and the devastation of the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, for example—occurred in centrally planned economies. Ecological devastation is not a result only of the economic system that exists in much of the world at the present time; while it may be true that the prevailing version of capitalism is unsustainable in environmental terms, there is nothing in the history of the past century that suggests the environment will be better protected if a socialist system is installed."
First of all, it has nothing at all to do with the passage quoted from Zizek that it purportedly comments upon. Second of all, it takes no note of the fact that the "socialist" regimes of the 20th century existed in a context of global capitalism and ran themselves accordingly, in most cases explicitly. Third of all, it takes no note of the fact that many present-day communists do not consider these legitimate socialist regimes (and not one of these regimes themselves ever purported that their system was communism; they were called "communist" countries as in "countries ruled by a communist party.") This is just sloppy and ridiculous.
"But it is difficult to understand the claim that the identities of anti-Semites and Jewish people are in some way mutually reinforcing—which is repeated, word for word, in Less Than Nothing—except as suggesting that the only world in which anti-Semitism can cease to exist is one in which there are no longer any Jews."
Is this actually fair? He's playing a shell game here–suggesting that Zizek is critical of identities like "Jew" while hinting, without having to back it up because it's only a hint, that Zizek in some way sanctions genocide against the Jews. I don't think you even have to read more of what Zizek says on the subject than what's quoted here (I haven't) to see that this is unfair.
In fact I haven't read a ton of Zizek and I'm sure there are damning criticisms to be made, but this article seems [i]immanently[/i] ridiculous; I'm flabbergasted that a philosopher can read crap like this and say "this seems damning."
BL COMMENT: I had some sympathy for your first comment, though that concerned fairness toward "socialist" countries, not fairness towards Zizek. But this is silly. I don't read this as implying that Zizek supports genocide, and I also don't think it's among the more serious critical questions raised.
I agree with Eric Butler that Gray isn't being wholly fair when he accuses Zizek of reducing Soviet atrocities to an "exercise in hermeneutics," and I think Gray isn't being very charitable when it comes to the anti-Semitism portion either.
That said, I saw Zizek speak in New Orleans and was very put off by what I thought were careless elisions between different meanings of "violence." Standard accounts of self-defense that justify violence in response to violence can easily be perverted if the initial "violence" is really a metaphorical term referring to some sort of social injustice. Suddenly terrorism (involving "real" violence where bombs are exploded and people are killed) is a perfectly valid form of revolutionary self-defense to any perceived injustice. The issue of violence as a political tactic in response to some kind of social injustice is complex enough without making the definition of violence itself fuzzier.
I think that extending our understanding of violence to incorporate systematic discrimination against minorities that makes them vulnerable to poverty and criminality is perhaps a profitable way to think…but I don't think Zizek is careful in doing so, and he fails to make the kind of clarifications necessary for this kind of thinking to do the good it might.
"And there is Žižek’s regular recourse to a laborious kind of clowning wordplay:
The…virtualization of capitalism is ultimately the same as that of the electron in particle physics. The mass of each elementary particle is composed of its mass at rest plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of its movement; however, an electron’s mass at rest is zero, its mass consists only of the surplus generated by the acceleration, as if we are dealing with a nothing which acquires some deceptive substance only by magically spinning itself into an excess of itself.
It is impossible to read this without recalling the Sokal affair in which Alan Sokal, a professor of physics, submitted a spoof article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” to a journal of postmodern cultural studies. Equally, it is hard to read this and many similar passages in Žižek without suspecting that he is engaged—wittingly or otherwise—in a kind of auto-parody."
What exactly is the criticism here? Is he wrong about the mass of a particle at rest? What does this have to do with Sokal–Zizek uses a colorful analogy here, nowhere does he claim to be saying anything scientific. This kind of crap is infuriating on its own terms; regardless of whether Zizek is an idiot or not, this Gray clearly is one.
I insist in my view… in fact I find some kind of historical materialism in Gray: "That there should be this isomorphism between Žižek’s thinking and contemporary capitalism is not surprising. After all, it is only an economy of the kind that exists today that could produce a thinker such as Žižek. The role of global public intellectual Žižek performs has emerged along with a media apparatus and a culture of celebrity that are integral to the current model of capitalist expansion."
End of jokes… I think he is unfair if he seriously pretend that article to be a critique of Zizek's thought, if not I find it good: "the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he perceives in the operations of capitalism.". Then I agree. "Equally, it is hard to read this and many similar passages in Žižek without suspecting that he is engaged—wittingly or otherwise—in a kind of auto-parody." Here also. And is it not Gray's critique a parody of a critique?
Note that I haven't read Zizek, so I don't know the context of the passage above. Given that disclaimer, I would raise two points:
1. The electron has a rest mass and it is not zero (it is 0.511 MeV, approximately). This may amount to a quibble, but there is an error to correct there.
2. I don't know what it means to say that there has been a 'virtualization' of the electron in particle physics. In quantum field theory electrons are seen as excited states of a quantum field, but I don't know what this has to do with 'virtualization' (though note disclaimer above).
I don't claim this vindicates Gray, but they are what struck me on reading the quotation.
Zizek is a cultural phenomena as much as a philosopher, and Gray's insight that Zizek's speculative industriousness mirrors late capitalism's speculative excess seems about right to me. Given what a Zizekian insight this is I think even Zizek would agree.
Like capitalism itself, the strange semaphore of Zizek's gestures are unable to conceive of any authentic vision for what comes after capitalism: both capitalism and Zizek seem genuinely stalled in a frenetic game of musical chairs that no one really believes in anymore but does out of habit. For instance, every time the Eurozone seems about to implode, it is somehow "saved" by a let minute bailout, and every time one of Zizek's endless digressions seems about to crash by means of its own eccentric frivolity, he suddenly manages to say something that seems at least superficially like an insight.
Zizek himself seems acutely aware that he needs to be just provocative enough to continue to grab attention, but not so provocative as to not be asked back on the lecture and op-ed circuit. That is the nature of the Zizek phenomena, and the stakes are very low indeed–given that intellectuals are mostly deemed irrelevant by the major organs of our culture anyway.
In reality, such as it is, Zizek is closer in spirit to the satire of Dario Fo and Alfred Jarry than he is to the labyrinths of Hegel or Lacan.
And yet, unlike Fo or Jarry I don't think the age we live in can be shocked by the minor transgressions of a philosopher: ours is an age of depletion and exhaustion, and seems as far from the intellectual climate of Marx's nineteenth century as could be. Ultimately, philosophy has become a quaint past-time, like knitting or model ship building, and Zizek understands this.
Nothing of substance to add, just that a language pedant I think the phrase "auto-parody" is a pretentious "auto-parody" in itself, where "self-parody" would serve perfectly well.
While it may be that Zizek makes physics errors, I think the main objectionable thing about these kinds of analogies is the connecting of a not so well defined thing (capitalism) to a very well defined thing (electron). If its stated carefully pointing out one may consider such and such property of capitalism as similar to such and such a property of an electron, it can be useful. But Zizek writes "The…virtualization of capitalism is ultimately the same as that of the electron in particle physics." Saying "ultimately", and "the same" here encourage a confusion of the precision of physics definitions with the hazier definitions of the other concepts being discussed. This is what was criticized in the Sokal affair and what Gray is criticizing in Zizek. Not to say that one can't discuss capitalism clearly, and have a pretty solid definition at hand, but I think the criticism is that Zizek doesn't use such precision.
Nat 'ultimately, philosophy has become a quaint past-time'… etc
I think this is part of the problem. It is because too many people don't take the time listening and reading philosophy as it is currently done that anti-intellectualism of this kind gets taken seriously. No one can be justified in saying that the best contemporary philosophy is not serious and engaged. Zizek is a substitute for people not wanting to master thinking philosophicaly but who want to give the impression that they have. Zizek gives the impression that he has read everything and people who like Zizek tend to like to give the impresion that they have too. It's sad that genuine scholars and thinkers interested in Hegel like Robert Stern don't get coverage in the mainstream press and on top of that they, and the whole of the philosophy profession, get dismissed by know-nothings as partaking in a quaint past-time.
I think you make a good point. The precision of physical definitions makes it very difficult to successfully pull off an argument 'by analogy to physics' unless one is right on top of the physics (and, as you point out, sloppy appeals to physics tend to irritate physicists).
Bordwell does a nice job exposing this fraud's work on the philosophy of film and film theory. Unfortunately, like some other areas of the humanities, the subject is prone to the kinds of fadish cults that worship the likes of this poser.
http://www.davidbordwell.net/essays/zizek.php
The interview he quotes a little over half way into the essay says it all.
I didn't view this as damning at all, just critical; and much more sympathetically critical than those who write Zizek off as a bombastic nutcase. I don't get much from Zizek, but it's nice to see him taken sort of seriously.
I suppose he may refer to the virtualisation of particles in general under the quantum mechanical system as opposed to particles conceptualised in the Newtonian system, that is conceiving of particles as mathematical points rather than "billiard balls". Dirac talks about the transition in Principles of Quantum Mechanics, if you need an authoritative source that physicists can't say boo to. As for the mass part, perhaps we could swap out the electron for an electron neutrino or a photon. I really don't think that these minor corrections do a heck of a lot to alter the suggestiveness of the analogy, anyone who knows enough about physics can make the corrections themselves (lord knows you have to do it often enough in physics textbooks) and anyone else is not going to even notice.
If 'virtualization' means 'viewed as a point mass', then certainly at one point physics virtualized the electron. However, it is more common today to take electrons to be excitations of a quantum field, which seems to me to be quite a different picture.
Of course, you suggest that the force of the argument doesn't depend on the precise physical details of the analogy as written. I have not read the source material, so I concede the point, but will make two others.
First, I understand the frustration of physicists who see philosophers drawing analogies to out of date physical pictures. Suppose a physicist were to write: "just as philosophers agree that anything that can't be verified is meaningless…" I suspect that philosophers would jump all over this as betraying an out of date and insufficiently nuanced view of the field, even if the argument that followed didn't really depend on assuming philosophers are all meaning verificationists.
Secondly, It is not uncommon to take quantum mechanics to lend support to various ancient, spiritual, religious, mystical or other ideas. I think many such claims rely on a misunderstanding or incomplete understanding of physics. For example, I have heard it argued that quantum entanglement entails that "everything is entangled with everything else" and this to support a particular ancient belief system. I think this is a misunderstanding of entanglement.
As I said, I am not trying to vindicate Gray's analysis. I am only defending care and precision in drawing analogies to physics.
I agree that at one time the electron was viewed as a point mass, but I don't think it is anymore (an excitation of a quantum field seems like a different thing).
As you write, however, perhaps the force of the argument doesn't depend on all the details of the physics analogy as written. I haven't read the source material, so I concede the point but raise two others.
First, I understand the frustration of physicists who see philosophers drawing analogies to out of date physical pictures. Suppose a physicist were to write: "just as philosophers believe that the world as it is in itself is unknowable…" I suspect that philosophers would object that this betrays an out of date and insufficiently nuanced picture of the field of philosophy even if the physicist's argument didn't really depend on the assumption that all philosophers are transcendental idealists.
Secondly, it is not hard to find reference to quantum mechanics in support of mystical, spiritual, religious, ancient, etc. ideas. For example, I have heard it argued that QM shows us that "everything is entangled with everything else", and this is taken to vindicate an ancient belief system. I think this rests on a misunderstanding of quantum entanglement. So I worry about imprecise arguments by analogy to physics.
Let me repeat that I am not trying to justify Gray's critique. I am just defending the need for care and precision in drawing analogies to physics.
Perhaps it could be said that Zizek is a clown, is a clown, is a clown – except that he aint at all funny.
What he really needs is a trickster to make fun of him when he gives he gives his tediously complex lectures etc.
And besides which is there any evidence in his personal life, or how he lives altogether, to suggest that we should take him seriously. Which is to ask, is he in any sense sane?
I despair that people waste so much time and attention – especially the academic community who allow this sophist to play the lecture circuit – on someone who simply refuses to be pinned down and helpful in what he says. If he thinks he has anything to say he should try to be more succinct, but he's really just playing the intellectual community for fools, much like Derrida did, so that will never happen. I don't know how people can defend his physics analogy – electrons have mass, even electron neutrons have mass, and their mass / substance isn't illusory, or only real in motion – Zizek is clearly trying to be obscure in that passage, and even though I haven't read the original text, I would bank on it being a certainty that he doesn't try to explain or elaborate on the analogy in any succinct way, so even if the analogy isn't just pointless obscurantism and a pretense to meaning, there's no attempt to communicate it's possible meaning to readers or his intended audience (that it amounts to intellectual posturing and obscurantism either way). As James said, he turns on imprecision, obscurity, elision and equivocation. If someone would like to suggest otherwise, I invite them to quote anything meaningful or worthwhile from Zizek, or to plot some of his key concerns.
For people familiar with Zizek's work, is Gray correct in attributing to Zizek the view that the rejection of the law of the excluded middle can be identified in some way with embrace of irrationality? In the quote form the first page of the review, paragraph 8: "Drawing on the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou, Zizek radicalizes this idea of dialectic to mean the rejection of the principle of non-contradiction, so that rather than seeing rationality at work in history, Hegel rejects reason itself as it has been understood in the past."
To JCK, who is a well-known logician and philosopher of math:
(Not a question at all about Zizek.)Are you identifying rejecting the law of excluded middle and rejecting the principle of non-contradiction? Many non-classical systems reject the former without rejecting the latter. Perhaps I'm missing something.
Thanks,
Steven
Zizek has replied, giving as good as he gets:
http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1046-not-less-than-nothing-but-simply-nothing
Hi Steve,
Thanks I meant the principle of non-contradiction, classically equivalent but not e.g. constructively.
J
This is desperate stuff by Zizek. The people who got tangled up in Nazi fantasies of the Jews are, as Gray rightly insists, Jewish people not fantasies of Jewish people.
In reply to Simon Glendinning:
It seemed pretty clear to me, reading Gray's review, even with the Zizek quote out of context, that Zizek was saying just that it was crucial to Nazis' self-conception that they demonize Jews (project a fantasy onto them). That this is what he was saying seems confirmed by the further context Zizek supplies in his reply. Zizek's claim is not insightful, to say the least. Perhaps that's in part why it might be natural to look for something more to what he's saying (that, and the way it's written)? In any event, there's nothing in the quotes that denies or hides the obvious fact that it was real Jews who were the ones who suffered the consequences. The quote Zizek supplies in his reply, which he says follows upon the bit Gray quotes, speaks of the millions killed.
I know next to nothing of Zizek and his work. Perhaps if I did, and read these quotes against a broader backdrop, I'd read them differently. But if these are supposed to be proof-text against him, they seem to suggest only that he's not particularly deep.
Steven
Zizek's reply is solid.
But I take issue with his disdain for the alleged failure of his critics to take the book's argument 'as written': "you ignore totally what the book you are reviewing is about, you renounce any attempt to somehow reconstruct its line of argumentation"
Zizek's clowning and slippery language, he tells us, is a game to help avoid reigning ideology. Liberal democracy only gives the illusions of freedom, we are all trapped by conventions of thought, etc. Fair enough. But if you're going to hang a framed photograph of Stalin on your wall, you ought to be more tolerant of reviewers who think that by 'violence' you mean, well, violence.
Is it really surprising, given the way in which Zizek expresses his ideas, that readers can be left with very different interpretations of what he might mean?
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