02.18.11

Repost/update: Zizek and Harrington

Posted in General at 1:27 pm by nemo

I am reposting some of yesterday’s comments on the left. Beside Zizek’s stalinism, it is worth recalling Harrington’s classic book Socialism from the seventies.
His perspective should have been a starting point after the fall of Bolshevism, but instead he is deep-sixed by the hard left that cannot shake itself loose from the Leninist nightmare.
Harrington provided the autopsy for all that decades ago, and his book is a reminder that the left is so caught up in mythology that it can’t function.
Harrington’s denunciation of the Soviet Union in the name of socialism is a timely one, as is his portrait of the real Marx/Engels of the period of the emergence of German Social Democracy. Marx was the first revisionist.
We need a new left that can extricate itself from the quagmire of propaganda in which it is embedded. Harrington’s book is a start.

The Parallax View
I have been critical of Zizek, but to give his works the benefit of the doubt, I have been trying to read some of them, but the task is apparently beyond me. The Lacanian take on Hegel sounds cute until you see, as in the first page of this book, that Zizek plans to rehabilitate dialectical materialism by doing a soft-porn curveball on torture and the basic Stalinist program.
Can we get a break here? This is a godsend to the right, especially the American Tparty nutcases who can actually look sane when confronting a Zizek.

Zizek’s basic strategy is wrong: dialectical materialism needs to be set aside as the left reinvents itself beyond Marx and his unnecessary theories. The situation could be rendered much simpler if the phantom ghost of the old left would drop the past, and start over.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A Lacanian-Hegelian philosopher and pop culture critic who divides his time between America and Slovenia, Zizek is one of the few living writers to combine theoretical rigor with compulsive readability, and his new volume provides perhaps the clearest elaboration of his theoretical framework thus far. Expatiating on such subjects as Heidegger, neuroscience, the war on terror and The Matrix, he seeks to rehabilitate dialectical materialism by replacing the popular “yin-yang” interpretation (the struggle between opposites that ultimately form a whole) with a theory of the “gap which separates the One from itself.” One example is a tribe whose two subgroups draw mutually exclusive plans of their village: their deadlock “implies a hidden reference to a constant… an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole.” Discussing Abu Ghraib and pedophilia in the Catholic Church, Zizek explores how an ideological edifice is sustained by underground transgressions: “Law can be sustained only by a sovereign power which reserves for itself the right… to suspend the rule of law(s) on behalf of the Law itself.” Based on his interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, he envisions a society in which public law would no longer sustain itself through its own obscene breach. This challenging book takes us on a roller-coaster ride whose every loop is a Möbius strip. (Apr.)

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