In an earlier post I scolded Slavoj Žižek for his position on the economic crisis. His idea was that the bailout is unfair, but in the current system the rich have to be helped for the poor to be saved, so he concluded with: "obey, but think". What irritated me then - and what has irritated me for as long as I have known Žižek's writing - is the reactionary character of someone who has the audacity to present himself as a progressive thinker. Now it would seem that - what a surprise - US banks are using the no-strings-attached 700 billion to buy other banks and not much of the money will trickle down to the people it was intended to help:
4 comments:
I learnt something about Žižek from you today. I agree with you about these comments on the economy and the bailout. But don't you think that people can be progressive thinkers in some areas and spheres and not in others? Take Toni Morrison the novelist as an example. She's written some of the most moving and sophisticated analyses of race history and politics in the States. But her spoken commentaries on current politics are sometimes naive and rarely of the same calibre. Isn't it too absolutist to say that a thinker is either progressive or not? On the other hand, who am I to talk? I can almost not speak to or read people who supported the bombing of Iraq, however 'progressive' their thought in other areas...
As a proper Marxist I must answer the question this way: no class (including it's intellectuals) can ever have a universally progressive character, but by acting on its own interests it can manifest a progressive moment. The French revolution was without a doubt a progressive force, but after 1848 the bourgeoisie quickly turned conservative (Lukacs does an interesting reading of Hölderlin's Hyperion interpreting it as a lament for the lost heroic days of the bourgeoisie: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1934/holderlin.htm )
So actually no person can ever be universally progressive - save the petit bourgeois with an "abstract humanism and democratism" (quote from a Yugoslav textbook on dialectical materialism) which is lacking all practical force.
But that aside, what Žižek is writing/saying is very consistently just plain silly. Whether he talks about how he enjoyed witnessing the tanks roll into Prague in 68 while eating a strawberry pie or whether he claims that German idealism is the pinnacle of philosophy, it is clear that no progressive thought can be expected from him.
Again, broadly I do agree with your premise and specifically I've learnt something about Žižek. I mostly know his stuff on cinema and games.
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