Returning to the debate surrounding Zizek’s analysis of 300, it seems that this passage from Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus is highly relevant. Towards the end of Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari write that,
The most general principle of schizoanalysis is that desire is always constitutive of a social field. In any case desire belongs to the infrastructure, not to ideology: desire is in production as social production, just as production is in desire as desiring-production. But these forms can be understood in two ways, depending on whether desire is enslaved to a structured molar aggregate that it constitutes under a given form of power and gregariousness, or whether it subjugates the large aggregate to the function multiplicities that it itself forms on the molecular scale (it is no more a case of persons or individuals in this instance than in the other). If the preconscious revolutionary break appears at the first level, and is defined by the characteristics of a new aggregate, the unconscious or libidinal break belongs to the second level and is defined by the driving role of desiring-production and the position of its multiplicity. It is understandable, therefore, that a group can be revolutionary from the standpoint of class interest and its preconscious investments, but not be so –and even remain fascist and police-like –from the standpoint of its libidinal investments. Truly revolutionary preconscious interests do not necessarily imply unconscious investments of the same nature; an apparatus of interest never takes the place of a machine of desire.
A revolutionary group at the preconscious level remains a subjugated group, even in seizing power, as long as this power itself refers to a form of force that continues to enslave and crush desiring-production. The moment it is preconsciously revolutionary, such a group already presents all the unconscious characteristics of a subjugated group: the subordination to a socius as a fixed support that attributes to itself the productive forces, extracting and absorbing the surplus value therefrom; the effusion of antiproduction and death-carrying elements within the system, which feels and pretends to be all the more immortal; the phenomena of group ’superegoization,’ narcissism, and heirarchy– the mechanisms for the repression of desire. A subject-group, on the contrary, is a group whose libidinal investments are themselves revolutionary; it causes desire to penetrate into the social field, and subordinates the socius or the form of power to desiring-production; productive of desire and a desire that produces, the subject-group invents always mortal formations that exorcise the effusion in it of a death instinct; it opposes real coefficients of transversality to the symbolic determination of subjugation, coefficients without a heirarchy or a group super-ego. (348-349)
A bit earlier Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between unconscious libidinal investments pertaining to social investments and preconscious investment of class or interest (343). The central problem that Anti-Oedipus sets out to tackle is that of why we will our own repression:
why do many of those who have or should have an objective revolutionary interest maintain a preconscious investment of a reactionary type? And more rarely, how do certain people whose interest is objectively reactionary come to effect a preconscious revolutionary investment? Must we invoke in the one case a thirst for justice, a just ideological position, as well as a correct and just view; and in the other case a blindness, the result of an ideological deception or mystification? Revolutionaries often forget, or do not like to recognize, that one wants and makes revolutions out of desire, not duty. Here as elsewhere, the concept of ideology is an execrable concept that hides the real problems, which are always of an organizational nature. (344)
One of the central theses of Deleuze and Guattari’s social thought is that the people are not duped, but at a certain level desire fascism and their own repression. What is at issue here is that we can have social movements that are revolutionary at the level of their preconscious class investments, yet nonetheless reactionary at the level of their unconscious libidinal investments. The situation is analogous to issues surrounding the death of God as described by Nietzsche; which is to say, the issue is structural. As Nietzsche somewhere puts it, it is not enough to kill God, but the place itself of God must be abolished. Nietzsche here distinguishes between a certain theological concept of God as a transcendent being presiding over being, and a God-function as a certain structural placeholder in thought, social organization, and practice that other things can come to fill without apparently having anything to do with the divine or supernatural. In short, there is a sort of structural theology of transcendence, a “theology before theology”, that is a form of thought, not an adherence to any particular popular religion. This structural theology, this structural transcendence, is what Lacan represents with the masculine side of the graphs of sexuation, where masculine desire is premised on the phantasm that there is at least one entity that is not subject to the phallic function or castration.
This idea of a structural transcendence without a folk religious conception of God that nonetheless haunts atheism can be elucidated with reference to Laplace. Laplace was, of course, famous for pushing the Newtonian laws to their limit, arguing that we live in a perfectly deterministic universe, such that if we knew the position of all particles at any particular moment along with their velocities, we could perfectly predict all past states of the universe and all future states. When asked about the place of God in his system by Napoleon, he famously replied “Je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse: I have no need of that hypothesis. One of the revolutions effected by the early Enlightenment thinkers was the thesis of movement immanent to the universe, requiring no transcendent intervention in order for it to occur. Laplace here echoes that thesis, and thus endorses an atheistic position. However, we should not be so quick to come to this conclusion. In putting forward his deterministic thesis, Laplace makes an appeal to what is referred to as “Laplace’s Demon“, which is the idea of an entity capable of observing and calculating all the states of the universe. There is thus a theology that continues to haunt Laplace’s thought, a structure of thinking, which posits a transcendence capable of surmounting castration. Although Laplace’s being is not a creator, does not intervene in the world, does not judge or condemn, does not define a set of moral laws, it is nonetheless a transcendence that, in principle, surmounts our embeddedness in the world.
Deleuze and Guattari appear to be drawing a similar distinction between concrete actual social formations and movements and whether these are reactionary or revolutionary, the structure of social movements that remain reactionary even when undertaken through revolutionary pre-conscious investments. This concern emerges in response to the history of the Soviet Union, where we had a revolutionary movement at the level of preconscious class investments and interests, but nonetheless ended up with a social system organized around highly reactionary unconscious libidinal investments pertaining to power and the party. No doubt Deleuze and Guattari are thinking of the highly disappointing role that the French communist party played in the events of the student revolutions during Spring of 68. The question then becomes that of how it is possible to form a revolutionary movement that does not fall prey to these sorts of unconscious reactionary investments that simply reproduce oppressive systems. “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” That is, how do we avoid simply re-instituting one and the same structure with differing decorations?
This was a problem Lacan encountered as well in the formation of his school. As Lacan remarks at the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, analysis aims at a beyond of identification with the master-signifier:
It is not enough that the analyst should support the function of Tiresias. He must also, as Apollinaire tells us, have breasts. I mean that the operation and manipulation of transference are to be regulated in a way that maintains a distances between the point at which the subject sees himself as lovable– and that other point where the subject sees himself caused as a lack by a, and where a fills the gap constituted by the inaugural division of the subject. (270)
That point from which the analysand sees himself as lovable is the master-signifier, or the place from which the analysand sees himself as being seen by the various authority figures with whom he identifies. In traversing the fantasy and discovering the Other does not exist, that the other is fissured, desiring, lacking, the analysand discovers a beyond of identification in drive. With regard to an organization like a psychoanalytic school or association, the obvious question is that of how it might be possible to form a collective or society premised on the non-existence of the Other. This is a difficult and paradoxical question to say the least. Clearly Lacan himself was a point of identification for the members of his school. He was treated as “the subject supposed to know”. Yet analysts of the school are supposed to have traversed the fantasy and thus worked through the transference, no longer positing a subject supposed to know or a master. This, incidentally, is why I’ve sometimes playfully suggested that Deleuze and Guattari are the real Lacanians: they do not slavishly repeat every word of the master, but work with the thought of Lacan and contribute to the development of a problem and set of concepts. At any rate, Lacan’s various declarations and letters in Television all revolve around this question of the production of a revolutionary collective. The history of Lacanianism since Lacan’s death suggests that the problem has never been completely resolved.
It would appear that we are still caught in this bottleneck. One of the difficulties with Deleuze and Guattari’s proposals– at least as they were taken up by the academy –is that they do not seem to generate any organized activist collectives, and therefore it’s worried that they provide no real tools for struggling with capitalism (I am not suggesting this is true). This would be the concern with a number of other post-structural theorists as well, where political theory is thick on critique and analysis, but provides very little in the way of workable praxis. Enter Badiou and Zizek. In a number of respects, I think Badiou, despite his fascination with figures such as Saint Paul, manages to skirt worries of re-instituting desires at the level of unconscious libidinal investments. Badiou is quite clear in his discussion of political events and in his thesis that a true politics is outside the “state” (Deleuze and Guattari’s preconscious class investments). However, with Zizek and his flirtations with figures such as Robespierre, Mao, and Stalin, the worry emerges that once again we’re moving down the path of a paradoxical “reactionary revolution”, where the new boss is the same as the old. The concerns that motivate Zizek are, I think, well founded: change requires organization, movement. Yet he seems to move in the opposite direction, turning questions of mobilization and organization in fascist directions. I have no answers to solution to these issues, but it does seem to be that one of the central questions is that of how revolutionary movements can avoid falling into reactionary traps.
August 5, 2007 at 1:14 pm
However, with Zizek and his flirtations with figures such as Robespierre, Mao, and Stalin, the worry emerges that once again we’re moving down the path of a paradoxical “reactionary revolution”, where the new boss is the same as the old. The concerns that motivate Zizek are, I think, well founded: change requires organization, movement.
Dr. Sinthome, for the umpteenth time: it’s essential for Zizek lovers, and those Marxists who follow his path, to understand what the former Yugoslavia was about. And I can see they don’t. This Moebius mechanism of authority you describe was INVENTED and PERFECTED in socialist self-management. In fact, the entire social experiment conducted in Yugoslavia is essential for the genesis of neoliberalism and social democracy. Because, there was a philosophy of universalising particularist concerns and power interests using socialist ideology; and neoliberalism didn’t really succeed until it buggered socialism. What is happening now in the West is a nightmarish replay of self-management, total control through the semblance of total freedom. Zizek’s retro futuristic resurrection of Stalin, Mao, et cetera is NOTHING NEW – that was Josip Broz Tito’s method of government. That’s why it is so obnoxiously absurd and creepy (because of its potential to cause real disaster) that we should return to it: do you really want to go through what happened in Yugoslavia just because the slovenly alien needs to save his declining career?
Now like anyone else I don’t really have an idea what the alternative might be, but I do remember witnessing something very extraordinary in the Serbian revolution, when Milosevic was put down (mind you – in a non-violent fashion, contrasting Romania, but also, those Eastern European countries who parted peacefully because it was in the interest of the European Union). This revolution was entirely self-motivated, and by that I don’t mean by desperation. The previous 15 years Serbs had lived in desperation and yet there was no movement to change. Something else happened – an affective movement which seemed to have come out of nowhere, lending the impression that it wasn’t a response to repression, but something creative; and it very quickly infected nearly the entire population of the country, where all sorts of classes organized themselves with very little guidance from above. We have a word in the local language for this strange Affect, which seems to overcome us periodically in history, but it’s untranslatable – ”inat” – something like defiance, but not fanatism, as consciousness isn’t lost, rather sharpened, and not completely Gandhi-like either, because the revolutionaries performed actively. You can see glimpses of this mentality in Makavejev’s Reich movie WR the Mysteries of Orgasm.
August 6, 2007 at 2:05 am
Zizek doesn’t flirt with Stalinism, nor with Maoism. The best thing he has to say about Stalinism is that “at least it’s not Nazism.” He diagnoses Stalinism as a form of perversion, which he takes to be the absolute greatest possible ethical failure. The essay Zizek wrote for the Mao book, available at lacan.com, is if anything even more negative than his stuff on Stalin.
Insofar as he’s talking about these figures, he’s trying to figure out what went wrong — he’s in the Marxist tradition, and he’s trying to take responsibility for that tradition.
Robespierre is different for Zizek — the fact that you’re lumping him in with Stalin and Mao indicates a certain over-hastiness.
Dejan, I’ve heard Zizek say in public lectures that only under neoliberalism does Stalinism come to its full fruition. (He never mentions Tito — Stalin or “the Stalinist subject” seems to be a stand-in.) And it goes without saying that he thinks neoliberalism is bad, just as he thinks Stalinism is bad. And he obviously thought Yugoslavian self-management was bad because he participated in the movement that led to its overthrow and was then actively involved in political action to try to keep Slovenia from collapsing into nationalism. He has absolutely never, at any point, shown any regret for his involvement in that movement, nor has he ever even hinted at a critique of the Eastern European anti-Communist movements in general — that “vanishing mediator” moment is his paradigm. To say that he wants to go back to Yugoslavian self-management is absolutely idiotic.
August 6, 2007 at 8:23 am
Adam, here your lack of historic knowledge is showing, for which I don’t blame you, because history has been ”conveniently” put through the NATO-UN filter, but do re-consider with new facts in light:
(He never mentions Tito — Stalin or “the Stalinist subject” seems to be a stand-in.) And it goes without saying that he thinks neoliberalism is bad, just as he thinks Stalinism is bad
(1) Did you ever consider WHY he never mentions Tito? This is systematically elided from his discourse. He only mentions Tito when he wants to portray himself as an important dissident in Communism *which he wasn’t by the way; he was just an aparatchik.
(2) he obviously thought Yugoslavian self-management was bad because he participated in the movement that led to its overthrow and was then actively involved in political action to try to keep Slovenia from collapsing into nationalism.
He did not participate in the overthrow of self-management per se; he participated in the seccessionist movement which ended up breaking up the federation. But the seccession was only possible in the first place because the constitution of the self-managing state, based on the works of the Slovenian Communist Edvard Kardelj, a close collaborator of Tito, nurtured and fostered the particular interests of all the separate republics at the expense of the same universalism (federalism) that it was ostensibly created to preserve. They used to call it ”decentralization”. This meant for example that the republics privileged by Western Europe, and those are invariably former (Catholic) proxies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, did not have to pay equal moneys into the federal budget for the development of poor republics and provinces (e.g. the neuralgic Kosovo). Over the course of some sixty-odd years this led to nationalist sentiments based in financial inequality: but only secondarily in Serbia, which is the only really nationally diverse republic of the former Yugoslavia, and which instigated all known federations since before the First World War. Primarily in Slovenia and Croatia, where Slovenia especially always had a strong case of Eurosuprematist nostalgia (”we are too civilized and advanced to live in this Balkan dump”).
So when the Berlin wall fell and the Masters of the Universe decided that Yugoslavia no longer made sense as an experiment, they stopped the influx of funding which sustained the self-managing system, opening up the possibility for Slovenia to join the European kingdom. You could witness the same processes taking place in Russia, which – though it wasn’t dismantled through civil war – was dismantled by severing Russian proxies from the Soviet Union. When Serbia confronted the Slovenian delegation with the issue of the federal budgets, that is to say, the fact that divorce costs money, they simply stormed out of the session (nowadays I think Zizek would speak of this ”embezzlement by ethnic self-determination” as the Act par excellance, a courageous leap into the unknown… et cetera) And then of course Serbia was cast in its standard historic role of the ”assigned wrongdoer” as we call it, which dovetails neatly with our historic position as the Russian ally on the penninsula.What followed you can see in Iraq as well: ten years of sanctions, complete isolation, bombing, forced neoliberalization, and most importantly for this forum, an entire Western academia (from Susan Sontag to Zizek) professionally engaged in demonization campaigns under the ironic banner of ‘’socialism”.
I mentioned parallels with present-day capitalism/globalism because, namely, I think neoliberalism similarly champions particularism (in the form of egoistic self-interest) under the banner of universalism; this particular form of soft totalitarianism was very successful under Tito’s rule, and Tito famously also co-created the United Nations as we know them today. Social democracy, on the other hand, distributes control with a big smile on its face, and I think THIS is the essence of dr. Zizek’s Christianity as well as his Socialism.
If you want more input via cultural production, Shaviro’s reviews of Eastern European films are particularly instructive (note especially ”Special Treatment”).
August 6, 2007 at 8:35 am
And on a not-entirely-unrelated note, I recently conversed with an Orthodox priest in Amsterdam who told me that the whole point of the filoloque dispute – which if you remember we discussed recently – was that the Catholic club wanted to believe in the mediating power of the Pope. This would parallel the ”belief in the Big Other” according to Lacanian psychoanalysis. I don’t know to what extent the priest is influenced by his own allegiance with Orthodoxy, but this sounds right already when you compare the accent that the Catholic church places on the role of the priest in confession, for example.
August 6, 2007 at 8:51 am
final comment (dr. sinthome you don’t have to publish them all at once, it’s difficult for me to keep all the references in one breath):
jonathan beller (”the cinematic mode of production”) put it in another way:
My present motivation for such an inquiry into
the political economy of consciousness and hence of
cinema, as well as for an inquiry into the _Cinema_ of
Deleuze, is suggested by the idea of “cultural
imperialism.” In as much as the phrase suggests not
just “culture,” but “imperialism” as well, and in as
much as we keep in mind that imperialism is an
economic undertaking as well as an ideological and
libidinal one, this phrase today remains an incomplete
thought. I mean to suggest here that whatever the
project of imperialism was, it does not cease in the
presence of the fantasy called Postcoloniality.^4^
Rather, as world poverty indexes readily show, the
pauperization process is intensifying. The
“expiration” of national boundaries and the so-called
“obsolescence” of the nation state only imply that
these national forms are being superseded (sublated)
even as they continue to do their work.^5^ The thesis
here is that cinema and cinematic technologies–
television, telecommunications, computing,
automation–provide some of the discipline and control
once imposed by earlier forms of imperialism.
August 6, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Adam, Zizek does indeed criticize Mao throughout his little essay, but he does not do so simply to dismiss or reject his position. Zizek is, after all, Hegelian which entails that there will always be a sublation involved in these operations. As Zizek writes,
Earlier in the essay Zizek criticizes Mao for advocating a sort of Manichean conception of being by rejecting the possibility of a negation of negation, but he does seem to hold that there’s something worth preserving in Mao. In a number of other places Zizek has also joked about being Stalinist. It seems to me that there’s a pattern here. We have the close analyses of Saint Paul’s particular flavor of Christianity, the essays on Lenin, Mao, and Ropespierre, and this recent essay on 300. In each case there’s a focus on the party form of politics. This is what I was trying to get at in this post. The preconscious form of investment is here revolutionary with respect to class interests and antagonisms, yet the unconscious form of investment is still based on alienating identifications with large molar entities or the party or movement and the discipline demanded by the party. Everything for the party! I think this form of organization inevitably leads to certain results, not the least of which are those in which party comes to be treated as an end in itself rather than as a means for accomplishing a set of aims independent of the party.
It is necessary to organize, but organization, groups-in-fusion as Sartre called them in The Critique of Dialectical Reason, also have their own dangers. The shortcoming of Deleuze and Guattari’s “politics”, is that you seem to get this idea that privately producing works of art becomes the revolutionary activity in and through the way it deterritorializes desire. There’s very little in the way of a theorization of collectives and collective movements, or groups-in-fusion. Yet Zizek’s strikes me as flirting with a form of collectivity that invites strongly fascist tendencies. Just observe instances of non-radical party politics in the blogosphere. Spend some time on a democratic or republican blog and observe what occurs when a party member criticizes the party: the purges immediately begin, all the force of the superego is brought to bear, the party is defended as the only avenue of change. The situation is similar on Marxist discussion lists where participants are greeted with extreme hostility if they don’t advocate a conception of politics and class that is centered around the proletariat as consisted of industrialized laborers (a category that has become somewhat problematic with shifts in post-industrial capitalism). I don’t know if there is a way of resolving this antinomy between the lack of efficacy involved in anarchism and the fascism that tends to emerge out of strong party/group identifications, but I do think it’s at least worthwhile to attempt to articulate the antinomy.
August 6, 2007 at 1:45 pm
‘And on a not-entirely-unrelated note, I recently conversed with an Orthodox priest in Amsterdam who told me that the whole point of the filoloque dispute – which if you remember we discussed recently – was that the Catholic club wanted to believe in the mediating power of the Pope.’
That’s just historically idiotic. From Aquinas to Maximus (i.e. East and West) everyone agrees that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father by way of the Son. The Filioque isn’t even in the Nicene Creed painted in St. Peter’s. The very reason for the Filioque first being used officially was to combat Arianism, who taught that the Son was a created being (i.e. anti-Trinitarian theology). That the Filioque became the center of a controversy over who held Church power has little to do with its historical development or even the schism of 1054.
Sinthome,
Certainly you have to accept that Badiou has not renounced his Maoism and that he is just as taken with virtue and terror as Zizek. I think in many ways his interest in St Paul is more telling of his anti-Statist tendencies than anything else, though he ultimately fails, in my view (and Alliez’s), to really get beyond the State in his formulation of politics. Perhaps I’m missing your point though.
August 6, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Anthony, what’s the Alliez that you’re referring to? You’re right about Badiou and Mao. The point I was trying to get at is that Badiou at least struggles with the idea of an anti-statist politics in his truth-procedures. In Being and Event, the State is conceptualized as that which presides over the count-as-one, distributing identities among categories characterizing the encyclopedia of the situation (occasionally Badiou will compare the State to Foucault’s power structures and epistemes). I think this allows for some cross over between Deleuze and Guattari’s strategies of breaking with molar aggregates, which could be taken as a synonym for the State in Badiou’s sense. Nonetheless, my worry is that this form of politics gets reterritorialized on another form of the State in the form of the party. Badiou strikes me as less subject to this danger than Zizek, though I could be mistaken.
August 6, 2007 at 2:36 pm
What exactly is wrong with the statement from Mao that he quotes? Simply that it’s from Mao? He specifies what he means by “repeating” Mao — it’s not just “let’s do Mao tout court.” Badiou’s apologetics for Mao are much more “whole-hog.”
You are really oversimplifying Zizek’s approach to these figures. Even though it’s grounded in D&G instead of classic liberalism, your approach seems homologous with Holbo’s article “On Zizek and Trilling.”
August 6, 2007 at 2:42 pm
I’m not at all suggesting that Zizek advocates something like repeating Mao whole-hog. It’s the idea of a party based politics that Zizek seems to advocate that I find problematic. You had suggested that Zizek thinks Mao is worse than Stalin, and I simply pointed out evidence to the contrary. My impression is that Zizek seems to have a very romantic attachment to such a politics, with all its accompanying discipline and sacrifice. That aside, I think there’s a lot of work to be done with Zizek’s conception of repetition, with echoes Benjamin and Deleuze in important ways, seeking the missed potentials of various moments in history, various philosophers, and various political figures. Nonetheless, I think Zizek was at his best when he stuck to ideology critique and the theorization of ideology, and that his political thought leaves a lot to be desired.
As a bit of a follow-up, I don’t wish to give the impression that I think Deleuze and Guattari are simply advocating some notion that art alone is revolutionary, only that I think there needs to be a more well developed account of collectives in their thought. Thoburn has already moved some of the way towards accomplishing this.
August 6, 2007 at 3:02 pm
That’s just historically idiotic.
The paraphrase I gave you from the priest was not historical, but theological. That was his interpretation of the meaning of the schism I assume as viewed by the Orthodox church. The same reoccurs, he told me, in Nikolai Berdzajev’s essays, to which I already gave you references.
August 6, 2007 at 3:03 pm
It’s particularly this passage that I’m reacting to:
http://www.lacan.com/zizhollywood.htm
I think Zizek moves a bit too quickly in suggesting that these values aren’t particularly fascist. What’s interesting here is that it is not consumer capitalism that he attacks above, but rather difference and sexuality, as if transversality or a community formed of difference, a community that does not subordinate identity to a particular predicate, is somehow a danger to revolutionary politics. This I find to be highly reactionary. What good is a revolutionary movement that does not allow us to more directly pursue our desire and love?
August 6, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Adam, here are Zizek’s own words where you can see he was in fact holding the side of the Communist Yugoslavia. I discovered here that he made an overtly propagandistic and crass move, typical of a political propagandist, by not mentioning that while the Yugoslav constitution did indeed lend the right to secession, the constitution also lent the right to the federal state to intervene if seccessionist moves would threaten the federation (thus the Yugoslav attack on Slovenia was not illegitimate). He then proceeds to put all the blame on Serbia, in the typical NATO fashion which then continued through a 10 long demonization campaign and continues to this day. Notice how he puts the word ‘’seccessionist” in quotation marks, ironically, as if Slovenia did not secede, but exercised its own liberalist free will – from the article ”NATO the left hand of God”.
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-nato-the-left-hand-of-god.html
Threatened by Serbian nationalism, even Slovenian and Croatian nationalism preserved a respect for Titos Yugoslavia, in any case for its fundamental principle, that of the federation of equal constituent states with full sovereignty, including the right to secede. Whoever overlooks that, whoever reduces the war in Bosnia to a civil war between various “ethnic groups,” is already on the side of the Serbs. Because in no way was the difference between Milosevic and other national leaders only quantitative. No, Yugoslavia was not hovering on the edge, betrayed equally by all national “secessionists.” Its dissolution was much more a dialectical process. Those that “deserted” Yugoslavia were reacting to Serbian nationalism — that is, to those power groups that were endeavoring to liquidate Tito’s legacy. Thus the worst anti-Serbian nationalist stands closer to Tito’s legacy than the present Belgrade regime, which maintains itself, in the face of all “secessionists,” as the legitimate and legal successor of the former Yugoslavia.
It Was Serbian Aggression Alone, and Not Ethnic Conflict, That Set off the War
August 6, 2007 at 4:46 pm
‘The paraphrase I gave you from the priest was not historical, but theological.’
I didn’t mean to suggest it wasn’t theological idiotic as well, because it is. Politically, well, it’s a bit blind, but not so idiotic.
August 6, 2007 at 4:49 pm
LS,
If you want just add this to the above comment, as I meant to answer your question. I’m thinking of Alliez’s essay in Radical Philosophy: ‘‘Anti-Oedipus Thirty
Years On,’’ no. 124 (Mar.-Apr.
2004): 7-11.
August 6, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Anthony, many thanks for the reference!
August 6, 2007 at 5:15 pm
I didn’t mean to suggest it wasn’t theological idiotic as well, because it is.
No it’s not. And as usual you didn’t provide any counter-arguments, except for thumping Augustine and I don’t know who else in my face, and then listing more names. It seems you need a spanky again, Anthony!
Adam it’s really impressive that you come in with a claim, get me to work providing endless repetitions of explanations I had given so many times before, and then refuse to comment further. I guess this is the Christian style of argumentation, based on faith solely!
August 6, 2007 at 5:40 pm
Dejan, That quote on Tito is equivalent to LS’s “damning” quote on Mao — he is specifying the one thing that he admired about the Titoist system. It’s a huge leap of logic to claim that he wants to reestablish Tito whole-hog, since Yugoslav self-management is the paradigm for the form of ideology he critiques in all his early work.
If you want to come down in favor of the Serbs, fine. But don’t expect me to take your critiques of Zizek seriously when they’re so transparently motivated by your own Serbian nationalism rather than by what he says in his texts.
August 6, 2007 at 7:18 pm
I’d appreciate if you not put words in my mouth, Adam. I did not suggest that Zizek wants to re-establish all of Mao, but that there’s a particular conception of the political or pattern in his thought that tends to valorize party. It’s not exactly as if this is a secret. Zizek has been arguing claims of this sort since Who Said Totalitarianism in one form or another. I take it that Zizek’s recent focus on figures such as Robespierre and Mao are a symptom of this. I do not think “discipline and sacrifice” are good solutions to the sort of problem Zizek is trying to solve. We’ve been down this road already and seen where it leads.
August 6, 2007 at 7:42 pm
‘No it’s not. And as usual you didn’t provide any counter-arguments, except for thumping Augustine and I don’t know who else in my face, and then listing more names. It seems you need a spanky again, Anthony!’
In order for there to be a counter-argument you would have needed to provide an argument first. You didn’t. If you want to provide such an argument go ahead, but I’m guessing Sinthome would prefer such theological arguments were made at your blog.
August 6, 2007 at 7:59 pm
C’mon folks, this discussion isn’t primarily about Zizek or Christianity or theology, but the question of how we form collectives that don’t fall back into fascist tendencies. Of course, this is just me whining about not talking about what I want to talk about. But damn it, that’s what I want to talk about!
August 6, 2007 at 8:18 pm
If you want to come down in favor of the Serbs, fine. But don’t expect me to take your critiques of Zizek seriously when they’re so transparently motivated by your own Serbian nationalism rather than by what he says in his texts.
The ”ASPECT” of self-management which dr. Zizek admired is the whole POINT of self-management. Under the banner of self-determination and self-functioning, a soft form of totalitarian control was being exercised by favoritism aimed at the republics which would later become members of the neoliberal empire. This created huge financial gaps between the members, with Serbia having to bear a disproportionate financial burden because of maintaining poor provinces. The financial gaps in turn formented particularisms, which ended up translating into nationalisms. So in other words self-management was its own negation, to borrow dr. Zizek’s favorite word. The whole thing was MANAGED.
”Serbian nationalism”: what is nationalistic about the desire to keep a destabilized federation together, with a common (socialist) market, against a newly-formed European capitalist empire? Did you even think where this phraseology (”nationalism”) comes from? What about Slovenian nationalism – that doesn’t interest you? There are Slovenian intellectuals OTHER THAN Zizek who can tell you about it, here http://parodycentrum.wordpress.com/2007/05/05/slovene-nationalism-of-the-unexamined-variety/
I do not deny Serbian nationalism, that existed parallel to all other nationalisms, but this is not the point at all. Nationalism is first of all not only and exclusively a negative term, and using it as such is pure globalist propaganda, and second of all, the Serbian position has never been primarily nationalistic – in contrast to the other, West-oriented republics. Look at simple statistical data on the composition of the respective populations: Slovenia is almost entirely comprised of Slovenians! Serbia in fact had a vested political interest in maintaining a federation/a heterogenous population because Serbs are dispersed around the whole of Yugoslavia.
A final note on nationalism – you know since I migrated to Holland, I can tell you I have never in my life met a more nationalistic ”volk”. All that is EVER discussed here is Dutch football, Dutch food, Dutch music, Dutch gay marriages and Dutch this and Dutch that. They have a very farmer-like, closed community here conducive to collective incest. And this is the case in most of Western Europe. Apparently nationalism is not indigenous to the threatening Balkan Other, as the imperial propaganda which you gobble up via American TV would like to have you believe, but I hope you’re smarter than that.
August 6, 2007 at 8:19 pm
but the question of how we form collectives that don’t fall back into fascist tendencies.
well you started developing this when you wrote about the communities of sentiment, so why don’;t you develop that thought?
August 6, 2007 at 8:36 pm
In order for there to be a counter-argument you would have needed to provide an argument first. You didn’t. If you want to provide such an argument go ahead, but I’m guessing Sinthome would prefer such theological arguments were made at your blog.
The argument relates to dr. Sinthome’s post in the following sense: if my Orthodox priest interlocutor is correct, then the Catholic viewpoint on the practice of faith is a belief in the Big Other, precisely what a revolution would have to dispel. And I quoted one simple observation and that is the practice of confession, where the ‘’sinner” places trust in the priest as his Big Other. This doesn’t exist in Orthodoxy as far as I know. You go to a priest for counsel, but he can’t cleanse you of sin.
For the rest I will open a post where if you wish we can get into the theological detail.
August 7, 2007 at 12:08 am
Dr Sinthome this much I think I know for sure: the single common demoninator I can detect in these confusing times is that for some reason, everyone agrees. Adam shouldn’t take this personally because it isn’t meant in that way – his response today is so typical of responses you hear every day – but to my provocation aimed at inducing antagonism, he doesn’t respond either angrily (you’re a monomaniac and an obsessive jerk), he doesn’t consider my argument for what it is, but immediately resorts to a notion collectively and commonly practised in the Western hemisphere, which is the story about Serbian nationalism. One encounters this everywhere: movies look the same; technology is striving toward ”convergence”; the differences between the Left and the Right increasingly formal; etc. It seems that society is reaching a particularly malignant form of totalitarianism the glimpses of which were discernible in old Yugoslavia. Whatever route one takes to counter this, I think it must be in this way or another related to the creation of antagonism, but then a productive one, because I think what’s brewing underneath this collective total agreement is a gradual fostering of particularisms that will one day erupt in much the same ‘’surprising” way they did when Slovenia divorced from us. One problem is that socialists don’t like to think about this because they feel their socialism is exempt from totalitarian tendencies – an illusion I would like to thwart with all my power.
The other thing that makes me curious is why do Americans and Western Europeans feel that they MUST be the new revolutionaries, and find it hard to believe that perhaps there exists the possibility, however slight and remote, that their countries are NOT the most important thing in the world anymore, that a possible decline of the Western Empire won’t be a tragedy for everyone, and that there might be fresher and better ideas in Russia, China, Australia or India? Like – why would we need dr. Zizek or anyone else from the West to ”channel” Russian ideas for us, as if Russia didn’t exist, except in some spectral form.
August 7, 2007 at 1:38 am
larvalsubjects,
This is why I have such a hard time getting into psychoanalysis…psychologists and anthropologists have proven quite able to demonstrate evolutionary reasons behind group behavior. Isn’t the real question not why do humans behave so irrationally in groups, but, how can we phase group forming out of the revolutionary program?
In what little study I’ve done in communist political appropriations of Marx (none through Zizek), it seems wisely accepted that Mao and Stalin simply misread, probably willfully, Marx’s revolutionary rhetoric. Not that there isn’t considerable tension between Marx’s various comments on the topic, but can’t we safely say that even he was fairly clear on the point that anarchism was the natural progression?
In any case, it’s pretty clear that you want to access this topic through thinkers I know nothing about, so feel free to ignore this comment.
August 7, 2007 at 1:45 am
What can we say? Comment threads are inherently rhizomatic.
August 7, 2007 at 5:00 am
I’ve tended to be rather unimpressed with evolutionary psychology and evolutionary sociology, as is the case with a number of other figures that work in psychology and sociology. This is not, of course, to deny evolution– I’m an ardent supporter –only that evolutionary accounts of psychological and sociological formation tend to appear rather circular and do not first pass through the necessary ethnographic critique that would allow the theorist to at least make some claim to not simply projecting unconscious cultural assumptions back on the phenomena they’re trying to explain in terms of survival and reproduction advantages (i.e., utility). That aside, even if we accept the evolutionary accounts, the question of group conflict remains one way or another, and the issue becomes one of determining how the nastier elements of group relations might be minimized.
December 23, 2007 at 8:52 am
[...] replacement of the existing government. It is a movement from self interest to the novelty of desire. Since self interest is always mediated by the existing structures of power and meaning, revolution [...]